BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Flock - the social web browser built on top of the Firefox - has a built-in blog editor. When I first launched it I was hoping to have some sort of Notepad for quick and easy blogging. Something that would look like Performancing plug-in for Firefox.

Unfortunately blog editor from Flock falls short of any other editor, even the one in WordPress itself. Editor window is very basic. Although Flock’s Accounts and Services tab allows you to have more then one blog configured, you have no idea what blog your post is coming to. XML-RPC API that WordPress uses is called MovableType. Maybe they are the same, but for non-technical people this is more then confusing.

Ability to choose from half a dozen fonts and regular named sizes doesn’t quite cut it to be a quickie notepad for any blogger. I can hardly imagine anyone using this crippled tool. Unfortunately, as with the whole concept of Flock, a thing that tries to be too many things for too many people ends up being nothing for all people. Here’s my prediction for next year - Flock will flop.

Technorati Tags: blog editor,blog,editor

Popularity: 21%

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… so why can’t we do?

While porting Firefox settings and bookmarks over to replacement laptop I realized that I am using a whole bunch of quite useful plug-ins. So here’s short run-down, in case someone missed any of these very useful things.

• FEBE - simply must-have. Transfers all your extensions, themes, bookmarks, settings and God knows what else. Unavoidable if you don’t want to spend couple of hours figuring how to do this on your own.
• AdBlock Plus - blocks everything and their cousins - all known advertising (banners, text ads, even Google ads). Another must-have extension. Personally, I was VERY surprised to see how messy, overstuffed with ads and unreadable some pages appear in IE/Opera/Safari. Ads are being blocked by the list to which you subscribe when you install the plug-in, so you may not even know something was blocked unless you see the page in different browser.
• AI Roboform Toolbar - actually, I don’t have the toolbar running, but I use “Fill Form” feature almost all the time. The software itself quite useful, especially with so many passwords to remember.
• ColorZilla - useful, especially during conversations with clients, when the phrase “I like the color I’ve seen on such-and-such web site” gets tossed around. You can actually go and pick that color (unless it’s a part of Flash movie).
• Download StatuBar - saves you the annoyance of watching that Download Window. Personally, I believe this is the plug-in that deserves to be included in the next release of Firefox. Version 2.0.0.7 would be just perfect for it.
• IE Tab - for lazy people who don’t like to fire up Internet Explorer to see how it looks. As far as I know it uses Internet Explorer’s engine, so the only two real benefits of this extension is that a) you get to see pages rendered in IE when you miss that “Open in New Tab” in right-click menu (I do sometimes) and b) you can get rid of IE icon on your desktop/quick launch panel.
• lori - Life of Request Info. Shows times from click to first received byte (can be treated as a server response time), from click to complete page display, loaded page size and number of requests. Very useful web developer tool, we at Zealus use it quite often to see how responsive client’s web site is.
• MeasureIt - allows you to draw and measure any rectangular area on the screen. Useful when you need to fit content (usually it’s Flash movie) in a already defined environment.
• NoScript - kills all the scripts (JavaScript, Java and so on) on a page if you want to. Very useful when some script-anxious webmaster puts that no-right-click JavaScript on the page you just happen to visit.
• S3 Firefox Organizer - if you are using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service you may find this one quite useful, although it does have a very big drawback - if you have a transfer in progress in inactive tab and are trying to close the Firefox it will not warn you.
• Save As Image - saves the area on the page as image. Very useful when we need to show a client certain area of the web site he may want to pay more attention to.
• SearchStatus - displays Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank and a bunch of very useful SEO data, like keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other.

Obviously there are many more useful plug-in, we had (at some point) had them installed and tested but turns out that these above are the ones that get really used around.

Popularity: 32%

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