© header image courtesy of Robert Grossman, 2007
Blog clients The advantage of blog clients is that they often extend your ability to format posts. They are also closer to word processing, if you are actually writing materials instead of commenting on websites. I also find them functioning a little better than the built-in html editor in edublogs itself, which is sometimes flaky in Firefox. When edublogs supports the more tag Edublogs does support the tag (so only an abstract needs to be posted on your first page, with the rest of the post available after clicking “more”) either client will add that feature.
These clients also do color. w.bloggar comes from wbloggar.com a blog client as defined there is
“The w.bloggar is an application that acts as an interface between the user and one or more blog(s); in other words, it is a Post and Template editor, with several features and resources that the browser based blog editors do not offer. Because w.bloggar runs over the Windows GUI, it allows the user to edit posts without being connected to the Internet. Posts can be saved locally; and anytime the user wants to publish a new text, one click on the w.bloggar icon in the system tray brings up the editor, and one more click will post it to the weblog.” http://wbloggar.com/faq.php
w.bloggar doesn’t need a browser to work within. In addition, it will retrieve your current posts for re-writing or editing. To set up an account for w.bloggar, www.nnnnn.edublogs.org is your host and /nnnnn/xmlrpc.php is your path w.bloggar will automatically retrieve your categories so each post can be categorized. It will also ping to various blog counting sites, like Technorati, to let them know you posted something into the blogosphere. NB—if you don’t post&publish the entires, you won’t find them through the edublogs dashboard. I don’t know where they go. w.bloggar will handle several blogging formats and will publish a post to several blogs at once (it says). Performancing for Firefox
Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs. Performancing for Firefox is for Firefox 1.5 and above only. We’ve made use of a number of cool new features within Firefox 1.5, so you’ll need that version of Firefox to try it.
http://performancing.com/firefox Performancing works from within the Firefox browser. It will work for a variety of blogging platforms, including edublogs. To set up edublogs select the custom blog type in the setup wizard. On the next tab, select Wordpress as the blog system type. Your API URL will be http://nnnnn.edublogs.org/nnnnn/xmlrpc.php The nnnnn is your blog’s name. Performancing will automatically insert tags for Technorati listing. Actually, it will insert a double set, so you’ll have to edit the post later from edublogs. Another way to do this is Xinha Here! This worked great for awhile then, didn’t work (Firefox can be flaky) [24 Jan 2006 Xinha does work but only if you set your options under Options to not use the visual editor. This is actually a faster way to edit and write materials than the visual or rich text editor mode. And it is fancier than the edublogs visual editor. With the visual editor turned off, you can also insert the "more" tag which will put only an excerpt on the weblog's first page. Unfortunately, this doesn't work on edublogs yet, but it is an excellent feature for the long-winded and the short attender. Xinha also counts your words and characters so you can fill in those limited forms on some sites.]
Xinha Here! is a Firefox extension wrapper for the Xinha HTML editor. It enables WYSIWYG editing in any textarea and textbox on any website. Xinha Here! opens a Xinha HTML editor in your browser allowing you to edit the data in a WYSIWYG on any website without copying and pasting to secondary HTML editor. To use Xinha Here! simply select Xinha Here! from the context menu (right click) of the desired text area or textbox. Up will pop a Xinha WYSIWYG HTML editor. Press OK and the valid HTML is pushed back to the original text box. Simple as that. Because the Xinha editor is installed on your local machine rather then a server it is both portable (use it on any website) and fast (files don’t need to be transfered over the net).
http://www.hypercubed.com/projects/firefox/
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2 responses so far ↓
1
mpb
// Jul 16, 2006 at 3:50 pm
I don’t Xinha as useful of late (it is still in beta, so could get better) as a full-fledged editor, but it does great for coding URLs and other little bits (then copy and paste into the actual post). Just be sure to cancel your Xinha editings. Otherwise, it replaces your content.
Also see, Coding long URLs in comments
2
mpb
// Sep 8, 2006 at 8:37 pm
Mobile Learning uses Flock as a browser and as a blog tool. http://mlearning.edublogs.org/
After getting his views, http://edublogs.org/forums/topic.php?id=184&replies=4#post-599 I thought I’d try it out.
As a browser I think it is slower than Forefox. As a blogging tool, it is easier to drag and drop directly from a Flickr (or Photobucket) account and from a news feed than is Performancing for Firefox. Flock respects your categories and supports multiple blogs. It doesn’t post as drafts, however. There is a wysiwyg and a code interface. It adds paragraph codes, which is annoying for WordPress (but I don’t use the wysiwyg editor on WP).
For aggregating material from on-line, Flock is better and easier than the native WP editing mode. Also, Flock will save your drafts locally, in a file location you designate. Performancing saves “notes” in the Firefox profile directory.
Worth checking out.
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