A Quick Look at ScribeFire

Like Deepest Sender, which I reviewed in a previous post, ScribeFire is also an offline post editor or a desktop blog client which is installed as a Firefox extension. This means that you must have Firefox to run it. That should not be a problem because you should be using Firefox anyway.

You can start ScribeFire by:

• Pressing F8
• Clicking on the ScribeFire icon in the status bar
• Selecting ScribeFire from the Firefox Tools menu
• Right-clicking on any web page you want to blog about and selecting "Blog this page" from the ScribeFire submenu
• Adding a ScribeFire button to your toolbar and clicking it.

A quick glance at the array of buttons on the toolbar would show you the main editing features of ScribeFire. You can, for instance, bold, italicize, and underline text by selecting it and clicking on the appropriate button. You can also apply strikethrough effects and emphasis, increase or decrease text sizes, and add links, images and video. It also has lists, justification, and blockquote tags.

The second row of toolbar contains special characters. This scrolls horizontally if you hover your cursor over the right and left arrows. Once you find the symbol you wish to insert, just click on it and it gets inserted in your document on the current cursor location.

What I like about ScribeFire’s editing features is that you can tell it to use CSS for content style in the options or settings mode. What this does is make the WYSIWYG editor generate more standards compliant code. For example, if you select text and click the italics button, it italicizes the text using CSS instead of using the presentational italics element (<i>).

Misspellings will be brought to your attention by red-dotted lines underneath the offending words. I do not know if this spell checking capability is provided by ScribeFire or by Firefox 3 but it doesn’t matter because if it is not provided by ScribeFire and you have an earlier version of Firefox, you can always download a spell checker extension.

On the right pane of the program’s interface, you will find more options for your blog or post.

The first tab is labeled Blogs. Here, you can see a list of your blogs ScribeFire can publish to, and options for adding, editing and deleting blogs. The next tab contains a list of the titles of the posts in the currently selected blog. The Categories tab contains all the labels or categories you have used in your blog. This makes it easier to add labels to new posts and to add new labels. The last tag is where you can set the time and date stamp of your post and include Technorati and Delicious tags if you so desire.

Now to the fun part. This post editor has good WYSIWYG functionality. If you click the preview button at the bottom or select the preview tab on top of the editing area, it downloads the template from your blog and uses it. As a result, you would see how your post, including images, would look on your blog.

While the dialog box above informs you that it is going to make a temporary post to your blog, it will only do so to enable it to download your template. It immediately deletes the temporary post after the template has been downloaded and even before you leave preview. It does not preview your post by posting it to your blog and viewing it there. I tried this and went to my blog; the previewed post is not there. So no need to worry that your unfinished post will be public when you preview it using ScribeFire.

A nice addition, though I have not tried it yet, is the ability to insert ads to your posts using ScribeFire’s own ads system. To use this, you first have to register to ScribeFire Quick Ads. Quick Ads is like an ads middleman. Using Quick Ads, you can serve ads from networks like AdSense, Kontera, IntelliTXT and others without having to deal with each one of them.

You can also promote your blog easily with ScribeFire. Click on any or all of the buttons in the Share This Page mode and you’re good to go.

What I don’t like with this editor is that it does not automatically generate paragraph tags when you press the Enter key. It also does not have buttons or commands to let you add them yourself. The same goes with headings. While there is a provision for adding custom HTML tags, it does not let you save what you just added so you have to do it all over again every time you need to insert another heading or a paragraph tag. It is easier just going into code view and placing the tags yourself with copy and paste. However, this is not a problem if you do not care what code is generated as long as the final layout looks right.

At the time of this post’s writing, Deepest Sender and ScribeFire are the only offline post editors that I know of which runs as extensions of Firefox. And between the two, ScribeFire wins hands-down. It is more feature rich than Deepest Sender and can actually connect to my Blogger blog. It also has a better interface. With the “blog this” functionality, it is so easy to blog about pages you read as you surf the web. The very small file size and quick download makes this a must-try post editor.