Blog About Web Pages Without Opening Another Browser
For all you fellow bloggers out there, I wanted to pass along my new favorite tool: ScribeFire. It’s a Firefox tool that allows you to write blog posts for all standard blogging applications like Blogger, Wordpress, or Movable Type without ever leaving the web page you want to blog about.
After you install the tool, setup is simple. You just:
- Type in your blog’s URL
- Pick your blogging platform
- Enter your user name and password
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| So let’s say I run across the movie Reprise on Rotten Tomatoes and want to write a post about it. While on the Rotten Tomatoes web page within the Firefox browser, I just go to the Tools menu and select ScribeFire. The tool opens up in a layer on top of the web page I’m on. This way, I can write the post in context. |
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| Need to add a link? No problem. Simply highlight the text you want to be hyperlinked and click the link symbol. ScribeFire automatically fills in the URL of the page you’re on (which you can of course overwrite). |
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| Through the tabs on the right, I have access to past posts. |
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| I can even associate the current post with my predefined categories. |
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| ScribeFire even gives you more advanced features like the ability to easily share the page with your favorite social bookmarking sites. Just click on the Share tab and you have same-page access to sites like Facebook and Digg. |
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| While the average blogger is still toggling between several tabs only, you’ll have the luxury of doing most of the work in context on the same page. |
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It works with Moveable Type, but not TypePad, right? Seems like they are leaving out a large portion of bloggers. I hope I have this wrong, do I?
The options listed in the dropdown during setup are WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Textpattern, Roller, MetaWeblog API, Blogger, and Tumblr. I looked on their Supported Services page. I see a few more services listed (like LiveJournal and MySpace), but I don’t see any additional blogging platforms. TypePad isn’t listed anywhere on that page. It’s also not in the Future Features section. I searched the posts on the ScribeFire site for “TypePad” and only got one hit (which didn’t have anything to do with ScribeFire). I agree that it’s an odd one to leave out because it’s so popular. I’ve never used TypePad though, so I don’t have any insights as to why it isn’t supported.
hey there. i’m a new blogger but a mac user and i use firefox as my browser. happy to hear about scribe fire.
if you are a mac user too, which blogging platforms have you found most mac friendly or do you use one you created on iweb? i am sure this comment area isn’t the best place to ask you this…but if you can recommend a mac friendly web host provider and a blogging platform that is mac friendly you would help a very exhausted new blogger after hours and hours of trying to find out info for a mac user. i did learn of machighway.com as a host…what platform do you use? thanks much. tre~
Hello Tre,
I am not a Mac user, but have heard a lot of great things about LifeType. It is an open source Blogging Platform for Mac.
If you wanted to be totally independent of the computer platform that you use, you should look into other more widely used blogging platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, etc. All of these blogging platforms can be managed via a browser interface and you can update you blog from any computer mar or pc as long as you have an internet connection and a browser. Here is a great post from problogger on how to choose a blog platform that is right for you.
And you can even use scribefire with any of those blogging platforms, unless you decide to go with the TypePad platform, which scribefire does not support.