Sure enough, the good people at Automattic have already done this and it’s been available for quite some time. It is a bit of a n3wb mistake not to have noticed it earlier, but that’s ok. I am comfortable in my ignorance.

Prepare yourself for more blogging!

Normally I do my blogging with Ecto. It’s decent software though still in beta for version 3.0. I like Ecto a lot and will likely continue to use it. I enjoy using external apps for writing – call me old-school. I can take it.

So it is with some interest that I’m trying out ScribeFire. This is not a simple “here’s your blogs post page in a sidebar” kind of extension. This is a full blog-editing application built in XUL and embedded within Firefox. It appears to have a bunch of other features as well, allowing you to publish web-pages to a variety of sharing services like Digg or Facebook. It also has del.icio.us integration allowing bookmarking bookmarking and tag-searching from within it. This feature alone is useful as del.icio.us hasn’t updated their Firefox add-ons as of this writing for version 3.0. That said, the del.icio.us integration in ScribeFire feels a little crude.

As a blog-editor, it seems pretty feature-ful. It supports editing pages in WordPress (a feature only recently added to Ecto) and embedding flickr or youtube links. The included search tools for grabbing images from flickr or videos from youtube does seem a bit limiting though. They are basic and you might do better to actually find the content you were interested in on those services yourself.

ScribeFire feels like a very reasonable blog-editing application. It gets the job done and seems to support most of the editing features I would want. Edits are easy (I’ve edited this twice now) and the sharing integration for Digg also feels pretty decent. Because it’s built on top of Firefox, a lot of the integration with third-party sites is essentially seamless, allowing you to use your login credentials for those sites right in Firefox. Awesome stuff!

Technorati Tags: blogging, wordpress, firefox, extensions

I made also decided to finally dump Gallery2 for my image-hosting and move everything to my flickr account. Having to maintain that somewhat horrific infrastructure along with WordPress compatibility which was never as seamless as I’d have liked was kind of a pain, and no doubt a security nightmare for those maintaining the machine this blog lives on. No more! Hopefully my Flickr contacts will bear with me while I gradually put up some older images to back-fill some of the earlier posts that included links to Gal2 images.

The Photos page can now die a slow death.

I have a couple of final changes and small additions I want to make to the already ridiculous bottom bar, and will probably continue tweaking CSS (embedded images need some padding, for example) but otherwise, I’m pretty pleased with the change. It beats the over-used Kubrick (with apologies to Michael Heileman who created it)

ReGen Podcast for November 5, 2007 from the album “ReGen Magazine (Industrial, EBM, Goth, Synthpop, Electronic)” by DJ Razorgrrl

So, what I would like to see is a plugin for WordPress that presents an interface with a plugin to iPhoto that allows me to upload a batch of files to a Page in WordPress. That page would inherit all of the styles of the containing blog and generally look like it belongs there. A folder structure can be created in the Pages area of WordPress that allows nesting within a top-level Gallery page.

This shouldn’t be too difficult as most of what I need is already in iPhoto and WordPress. I think using the Pages section of WordPress would be a natural, sensible place to put this. No modifications to the database will be required (hopefully) and iPhoto’s webpage export function should produce the HTML and thumbnails that will be included in the page.

We Shall See…