Performancing, Initial Thoughts
I’m writing this using Performancing for Firefox, a WYSIWYG blogging extension. In essence, this is Flock for Firefox, something that I predicted would appear sooner or later. My overall impression is very positive. As with Flock, setup was easy and painless, involving the entry of my blog URL, user name and password. It then downloaded a list of all my existing posts and categories, so it’s much quicker and easier to update entries without dealing with all the latency of the web-based Wordpress interface.
The editor appears in the bottom half of the browser window in a resizable pane, so I can continue to surf around (including moving between tabs) while I blog. It’s easy to drag and drop hyperlinks and images into the editor, something that’s a real pain to do with a standard textarea. You can edit in the WYWIWYG view or move to a source view where all the HTML tags are visible. And, as a bonus, it allows you to create notes that are stored locally and can be searched. This may end up being the killer feature for me, since I often have thoughts and ideas but no convenient place to put them.
I do have a few nitpicks. Hyperlinks dragged into the editor retain their existing formatting, whereas I am far more likely to want them to take on the formatting of the surrounding text. They are also enclosed in a <cite> tag, and there’s no way to remove it without moving to the source view.
I’ve been using Scribe for months, so I’m used to pressing Ctrl-S incessantly to save my blog posts and avoid losing work. Performancing lets you save using Ctrl-S, but it saves the text as a note which remains even after the post is published. It also prompts you to confirm that you want to overwrite the existing version, since it doesn’t appear to know that you are saving a new version of the same text. I’d much prefer for blog posts to be saved as drafts somewhere (as Wordpress does natively) and deleted automatically when they are published. And Ctrl-S has to work silently (i.e. without confirmation) in the standard case.
The formatting of the actual HTML published to the blog is a bit opaque. Both the title and body of my last post had a bunch of whitespace preceding them, though this only showed up when I viewed the source (i.e. it’s not visible on the blog itself). And the tags and text run together in a way that is clearly made for computer consumption only. I wouldn’t relish editing these posts manually (e.g. from an internet cafe without access to Performancing). It would be great if there were some kind of pretty-printing applied before publishing.
I also discovered a seeming bug when I forgot to set the category for my last post. I was able to view the post in Performancing’s history, but when I changed the categories and selected “Publish as Edit”, the blog was not updated.
In general, the editor still has some hiccups, and it’s too often necessary to have recourse to the source view to correct non-visible elements like the above-mentioned <cite> tag. Also, the source view doesn’t sync up with the WYWIWYG view when you skip over, so you have to scroll down manually. But in general, the editor represents a huge step forward compared to my previous approach of using a textarea souped up with Scribe and Julien Couvreur’s Textarea Resize script. Only time will tell whether this becomes my preferred blog authoring method, but it’s great to see that we’re making progress.
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Thanks for the review.
Yes, PFF (performancing for Firefox) has a long way to go still. We are releasing version 1.1 very soon now witch will add trackback draft and initial technorati and delicious support and integration.
I’m hoping that by next version (post 1.1) we will address allot of the shortcoming that MIDAS in firefox has and give you much better control over the WYSIWYG and source.
Also, thanks for the criticism.. I seriously appreciate constructive criticism it as it really helps me prioritize bugs and figure out what I and others would like as well.
Cheers for that
-Jed
Comment by Jed — 1/19/2006 @ 9:27 pm
[…] I’ve also tried Performancing for Firefox that integrates within FF (right click and blog/ review found here)and have just recently downloaded the Flock browser with integrated blogging options right in it. I need to fiddle a bit more with this one. It’s an impressive browser, with many options but at first try it is somewhat slow to load pages. It is only a beginning I suppose. A review of Flock beta is found here scroll down to blog editor for specific information. The previous post was blogged with the trial version of Blogjet. For some odd reason the full text was blogged but only the intro shows up on the home page. I tried to republish to no avail. It is not that serious. The full posting can be viewed by clicking the title. When first publishing a post with an uploaded picture, the settings here at edublogs would not allow the image to go through. […]
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