Our Movable Type blogs come with a handy utility named Quickpost (look for it on your opening blog admin page). It adds a bookmark to your Firefox toolbar that, when clicked, opens a login window to your blog, starts a new message, then grabs the URL of the web page you are on and inserts it in the message. It’s a quick and easy way to send a web page to your blog, but it’s also a quick and easy way to get to a new message window so you can create a blog entry.
That’s what I’ve been using to create most posts to my blog. Until today.
Wesley forwarded a link to a Firefox add-on named “Performancing.” Like all Firefox add-ons, this installs in just a few seconds. Once installed, you’ll see a little icon at the bottom of the screen. Click it, and after filling in the obligatory install settings (see below), you get an HTML editor that lets you create a post, choose the blog or sub-blog to post it to, even choose a category.
It gives you all the standard basic HTML editing features: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, increase/decrease font size, lists, links, images, justification, color. You can edit in “source code” mode, and you can preview. It does not appear to let you do tables, but this is for creating blog entries, so that’s not a big lack.
Optional settings let you choose to enable draft mode as the default instead of publish mode, and to save a local copy of the post after it is sent to the blog.
Does it work? Well, I created this post with it!
Note: when installing, choose Manually Configure, Custom Blog, select Movable Type as your blog, then put your blog address where they have myserver.com. So, if your UVMNet ID is jsmith your regular blog address is http://jsmith.blog.uvm.edu, and here’s what you would type for the setting:
http://jsmith.blog.uvm.edu/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi