Performancing Firefox 1.2 Beta Released

    With all the Metrics hype (and much deserved, I love it!), don’t think we’ve forgotten about our PFF Blogging extension.
We’ve been reading all of the forum posts, listening to all of the requests and bug reports, and while we haven’t been able to implement them all (heck, we need to leave some work to do for the next version 😉 ), 1.2 should be a huge update.


To make sure we’ve really gotten this release done, we are asking that you, our members take this first beta for a spin and tell us what you like and don’t like, what doesn’t work like we said it does and any improvements that you think should make this release (please keep large requests for the forums for the next version).

New features in 1.2beta1

  1. Image FTP Upload
  2. Basic Metrics Chart viewing
  3. Blogger.com improvements (Currently there are issues with the blogger.com service)
  4. API url autodetect
  5. Much improved stability and performance.
  6. Fixed PFF from promting password on firefox startup (for masterpassword users)
  7. Optional “Powered by Performancing” tag insertion.
  8. Better category support for other blogging platforms.
  9. Quick File FTP upload (under Performancing in the context menu).
  10. Bug fixes for trackbacks.

Download and install Performancing Firefox 1.2 Beta

While we believe this beta is on par with the quality of our official releases, since it has not yet been in the hands of more than a few people, we do ask that you create a new Firefox profile for testing this beta release and report back any issues or problems you may have.

Image Upload

In PFF click on the Image Insert button on the toolbar.

You will then be prompted with the following window:

Click on the “Upload to FTP” Option and click the ‘browse’ button to locate the image you would like to upload.
If you haven’t done so yet, click on the ‘Settings’ tab and configure your FTP settings.

Now go back to the ‘General’ tab and click on “upload image” to start the upload process

Once successfull your new URL will be generated.
You can either Copy the URL manually or click on the ‘Insert Image’ button to add it to your current posts content.

Note:
Image and File FTP uploading is currently limited to one FTP profile
configuration, multiple profiles will be added to the next beta or
version release.

API Autodetect

A new addition to the Account Wizard is ‘autodetect’.
While you can still manually configure your blog account, PFF will try and find your API URL and settings for most common blogs.

First enter your blog URL into the textbox:

Then click next or “Check URL”

If your blog settings were found, you will presented with the API URL and blog settings.

Note: Please
note that autodetect support may not work on many different blog
platforms, specifically Drupal, Old MovableType installations, and a
few others.

Quick File Upload

Along with FTP Image upload, we have added a very usefull utility called “File FTP Upload”.
You can access it from the main Firefox context menu under “Performancing -> FTP File Upload”.

Once launched you will be presented with a dialog very similar to the ImageFTP Upload dialog.
Click on “Browse” to select the file you would like to upload.
Once uploaded you can either copy the URL that was generated, or click the “Copy URL to Clipboard” button.

Blogger.com improvements

  • While we have implemented Blogger.com improvements to allow posting rich content from pff, at the moment Blogger.com is having some issues that they are trying to fix that will stop posting to Blogger blogs for a little while.
    Unfortunatly this applies to all blogging products that use the blogger.com ATOM API for posting.

    A temporary work around is to use the old blogger API, however the pitfall of using it is the lack of support for the title field (stupid api), meaning all your posts will be untitled.

    To use the old bloggerAPI, follow the following instructions:

    • Launch the Account Wizard and click on ‘Manually Configure’.
    • Choose ‘Custom Blog’ from the drop down menu, then next.
    • Choose ‘Blogger API’ from the drop down menu and add http://www.blogger.com/api as the Server API URL
    • Use your normal blogger.com username and password and you should be good to go.

Sorry for the inconvenience, hopefully we will hear from Google/Blogger soon with more information on when a fix will be available.

12 thoughts on “Performancing Firefox 1.2 Beta Released

  1. I just discovered this masterpiece of software today. In my opinion it is one of the best blogging solutions i have seen up to now.
    But i have a major problem with posting to my blog (LifeType 1.0.3).
    It seems i have configured the API (Meta Weblog) correctly as i can see my previous posts and categories.
    Unfortunately if i choose a category and try to post something Performancing replies with success but on the page is no post.
    If i dont select ANY category at all it posts fine to the blog selecting (presumably) the category that was set up most recently. This is really getting on my nerves. 😉

    And for future releases maybe you could include the media management (auto thumbnails and ressource upload) of the blogging script. But i dont know if it is supported by the API 😕

  2. Jed, when I click on the XPI link, shouldn’t I get a dialog asking me “OK” to install? Instead, the contents of the .xpi file loads right into a browser tab.

  3. Ok so i don’t know how it’s sorting categories on my wordpress now but before it was in order added and now it appears random why can’t i just have them sorted alphabetically?

  4. If I select text on a page and choose “Blog this page” from the context menu, the selected text appears in a blockquote, but the closing blockquote tag is missing an angle bracket.

  5. I love it. Much better. (I’d still like to see it use paragraph tags, but I know that’s coming.)

    Two minor nits:

    1) Every time I go to FTP an image, the dialog box has reverted to “From URL” and I have to switch back to “Upload to FTP.” It would be great if it remembered my last setting.

    2) The color choices in the Image Upload dialog are a bit wonky — a beige entry box on a white background? Feels backwards.

    Otherwise, though, what a welcome improvement!

  6. Just flight-tested performancing-1.2 on a clean Firefox 1.5.1 profile, and it works fine. I am confident that it will work fine on my everyday, default profile.

    Thanks for a great job!

    Uncle Tim

  7. I am using it right now howver i’d like it that i could upload via ftp in 2 clicks

    1st click browse for image
    2nd click insert image

    and not have to bother with pressing the upload image button it seems pointless to have to select that if i already selected the ftp upload radio button 😀

  8. The spacing of characters in the main editor textarea is still wacked on a Mac – toward the right side of the box, characters become invisible, and the position of the text carat gets weird. Makes it pretty much unusable.

  9. Hi Jed, I just published my first PFF 1.2b article here on p.com and all went fine.

    Thanks for the nice work!

  10. Hey Jed, it’s a superb beta

    I dont see any issues, and i LOVE the metrics tie in!

    Good job

Comments are closed.