Performancing’s Blogging Extension

For this post, I’m trying out the new, 1.1 version of Performancing’s blogging extension for Firefox. (See the release notes.) I think there’s a lot of potential in a blogging extension, but it’s not really realized in this product.

My #1 request is to make it easier to make links to pages — that being my blogging hangup — and I can see a few missed opportunities in that regard. For example, there’s a tab that shows a history of my past 10 posts. I’d like to be able to drag these in to the posting window (or at least right-click and get a “Copy permalink”) to make a link to them. There’s del.icio.us integration, but no clear way to include a link I’ve bookmarked in a blog post. Finally, I’d love a little shelf to collect links and images that I can then put into a post.

I do like its location on the screen, though. It occupies a panel below the web page, so it’s always visible as you write a post, even as you flip through tabs and search for stuff to write about. In that way, I think it may be slightly more useful to me than, say, BlogThis!, even if it is 10x uglier.

So, while I probably won’t use it day to day (or whenever I do blog), I’m certainly keeping my eye on this tool.

Waiting to publish to see its HTML generation… Should be okay, since it appears to use Midas, which is Mozilla’s rich text editor. (At Blogger we have significant code to clean up the output of both Midas and IE’s rich text editor.)