Essential Firefox Blogging Extensions: Performancing and FireFTP
I stopped using Internet Explorer over a year ago in preference for Firefox (I’m half half with Safari and Firefox on the Mac), I love it and all the cool extensions you can get for it. IE6 was unbearably clunky and the whole registered Windows users verification thing to download IE7 was just such a turnoff (I installed it on my Windows computer but it all seems too much like spyware for me… it completely put me off using it).
Long story short, I love Firefox and totally recommend it for all your blogging needs. To download the latest version go to: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Extensions are really easy to install, mozilla.org has a whole list of them, click on the “download extension” button and then restart Firefox, yay, it’s installed!
My top two blogging Extensions are:
Performancing: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1730/
Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browser and lets you post to your blog easily. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as well as post to your blog.
I couldn’t live without Performancing, it lets you toggle back and forward from rich/formatted text editing to html fixing. There’s a few things that you can’t do (yet) in Performancing like change authors/dates or use the functionality of any plugins you’ve added to WordPress but you can add categories and Technorati tags as well as save in drafts.
The best thing about Performancing is that it makes posting really easy, it remembers your password so you can just start typing, you don’t need to go to your blog and log in (could save you hours and days over your blogging lifetime…). If you’re blogging on a webpage, you can view the page at the same time as you blog. Selecting text and then right clicking gives you the option to send that snippet complete with page link straight to the Performancing editor.
Performancing is also a brilliant tool to manage multiple blogs. It works with a number of major blogging systems not just WordPress (eg I have my Blogger blogs on there as well). You just select which blog you’re writing to (before or after you’ve finished your post) and click “Publish” and it goes straight to that blog, no passwords or logging in! Brilliant! It will also give you the past 10 posts in each blog and the categories you posted under, and you can go back and post changes as an edit.
FireFTP: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/684/
This a free and great FTP program that works through a Firefox browser tab or window. I love it and is essential for uploading theme and plugins to your blog’s directory and other general uploading/deleting tasks that pop up when you’re developing and maintaining your site. It can save your passwords and just make the whole FTP thing breezy and less of a chore.
It is actually charityware so if you find it useful, you’re encouraged to donate to its development, half of the amount goes to supporting orphans in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina.
blogmaking.net » Blog Archive » Backing Up on 18 Nov 2006 at 8:14 pm
[…] Note that this method doesn’t backup your themes, plugins or any modifications that you may have done to them. When you do any major design or plugin changes, you should also make a copy of your themes and plugin folders (you can find them in the wp-content folder)… use an FTP program like FireFTP or your host’s web based file manager to do this. […]