How Will It Work?

When writing your post, you’ll do as you’ve always done: choose a title, write some content, and click “Publish.” After it finishes publishing to your first blog, you’ll be given the choice to publish it to any of your other blogs:

Simply check the other blogs you want to publish the post to, and click “Publish to these blogs too.”

What do you think?

Since this feature hasn’t been released yet, this is the perfect time for you to give feedback that could really alter the way this feature works. What do you like about it? What don’t you like about it? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

If you run a blogging service that you want ScribeFire to support (or if you’re a fan of a service for which you want support added), here’s what you can do: create a test account for use by ScribeFire and email the blog URL, username, and password to chris@scribefire.com. (Do not send usernames or passwords for your real accounts.) I’ll add these accounts to the gamut of tests that run before I release a new version of ScribeFire; if any bugs have arisen that affect the way that ScribeFire interacts with those accounts, I’ll be able to fix them before causing you any trouble.

I already have test accounts for the following services: Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous, LiveJournal, and Xanga. Accounts for Drupal, Joomla, and MovableType/TypePad are high on my wishlist.

This is the current state of the layout for the next update to ScribeFire. In the left-hand column, we have the Blogs dropdown, the Posts dropdown, Categories, and Tags; in the larger right-hand section are the Title, Editor, and Publishing Options. (Click the screenshot for a larger view.)

I think that this arrangement gives the maximum amount of space possible to the editor while still keeping the other portions of the interface easily available.

What do you think? What would you change? What changes do you like?

1. The current layout:

2. A bottom toolbar that lets you switch between sections like “Edit,” “Categories,” “Tags,” and “Publish:”

3. A mini-sidebar that moves Categories and Tags into a sidebar next to the editor:

4. A bigger sidebar that moves everything except the post title and editor into a sidebar:

5. Something else. (Explain yourself in the comments.)

Please leave a comment with the number that you’d vote for. Keep in mind that these are just rough approximations; ignore things like the exact colors or spacing between buttons.

Starting with Firefox 2, Mozilla began creating improved methods for extensions to store their settings, but until now, ScribeFire wasn’t taking advantage of them. However, over the past few weeks, we’ve been busy rewriting and updating the code in ScribeFire that is responsible for storing things like notes, blog entries, and the settings for all of your blogs to have them use these newer Mozilla features. While these updates won’t change the way ScribeFire appears to work, they will allow us to fix bugs and add features more quickly in the future.

Due to the extent of the behind-the-scenes changes, we’re asking anyone who would like to help us get this next release out the door to download this beta version of ScribeFire 3.1 and test it out. It shouldn’t appear to work any differently than version 3.0.1; all of your notes, blogs, and posting history should be transferred seamlessly to the new system.

If, after downloading and installing this beta version, you encounter something that is not working as it did before, please report it as a bug here, or you can just leave a comment on this post explaining the problem.

Warning: while we’ve given it some thorough testing, we can’t guarantee that you won’t lose some of your settings by trying out this version. However, if your settings are not transferred correctly, we will be able to give you instructions on reverting to the previous version of ScribeFire and restoring your notes and settings.

For the following features, we’ve started working on them and they should be present in one of the next releases: (You can click on the linked words to comment on the feature or view its progress.)

• Synchronize settings between computers
• Ability to delete multiple notes
• Support for Thunderbird
• Automatically check the “Modify Timestamp” box when the timestamp is changed
• Ability to organize list of blogs

Some of the features you asked for have since been completed or were already there, but you just didn’t know it:

• Word count (Right click, choose View > Word count)
• Live Preview (ala Windows Live Writer); added in version 2.3
• Image uploading for Blogger; has been in ScribeFire for a while now; if it’s not working for you, file a bug report
• Keyboard shortcuts; they were broken for a few versions but have since been fixed
• A better publishing workflow was added in version 2.3
• Spellchecking; ScribeFire has always used Firefox’s spellchecker; if it’s not working for you, file a bug report
• Image titles; just select the image, right click, and choose “Edit Properties…”

There were a few requests that we’ve decided not to take any action on, mostly due to time constraints:

• Make ScribeFire an independent application
• Send comments from ScribeFire
• Automatic posting to multiple blogs. This one has come up before, and our current response is still to just click “Keep Content” after it posts to the first blog, and then change blogs and publish again. We may reconsider this feature in the future.
• Facebook Notes integration
• Multi-user support (multiple users in one Firefox profile). This is handled well enough by Firefox’s mulit-profile support.

For most of the other features that were requested, we haven’t started working on them, but we’ve put them on our To-Do list and will get to them eventually:

• Color code drafts vs. published entries in the Entries list
• Title templates for “Blog This”
• Gallery2 integration
• Clipmarks integration
• Button for code
• ScribeFire in the sidebar
• Customize WYSIWYG editor font
• Better Flickr search
• Better support for blog-specific features (like in LiveJournal, MySpace, etc.)
• Image thumbnail creation
• Image padding
• Better table support
• Google Video support
• Better Joomla support

We appreciate that you took the time to give us your feedback; in the future, you can request a new feature or report a bug at any time by filling out this form.

What other services or products do you use today that you would like to see integrated directly into ScribeFire?  Please let me know in the comments below or if you are a provider of such a product or service that you think would be a great tie in for over 150,000 active users of ScribeFire, reach out to me at patrick (at) scribefire.com  Thank you!

Here’s our current design (click for full-size):

And here’s a proposed redesign (click for full-size):

What do you like about the new design? What don’t you like? Any other changes you would make?