A Cool Firefox Extension

When Blogger started up its beta version, one of the things that it broke was the ability to use "XBlog This!", which allowed you to highlight a paragraph or two from an article and post a blog entry on it. Considering the other features of the new version of Blogger (which this week officially emerged from beta status) I thought that was an acceptable price to pay.

When coupled with Firefox 2.0 (with its on-the-fly spell checker), I thought I had a pretty good combination. One of the features of Firefox is its ability to use plugins and extensions. One such extension is the Performancing for Firefox utility with provides a WYSIWIG editor (quite similar to the blogger editor) in a split screen that allows you to cut and paste from a web page to the editor. I have been using this for a few days now, and I like most of what I see.

One thing that they could do better is not to insert so many line feeds between paragraphs. In this sense, it is not fully WYSIWIG, as I tend to edit it again with the blogger editor to format it the way I want to see it. It would also help if it supported Blogger's labeling facility. Again, if I want labels I go back into the blogger editor and add them.

Whether this will prove to be as convenient and efficient as the "XBlog This!" button I grew to depend on remains to be seen, but so far the features of Performancing for Firefox outweigh its shortcomings.

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