Performancing Services

Dammit. I just went on a little post frenzy and totally forgot about a small feature we built into the new PFF 1.2: Namely the “powered by performancing firefox” attribute you can enable in the settings tab.

A small thing for sure, but for anyone kind enough to want to help us spread the word, a simple way to do it without even thinking about it….

Keen observers will note that the html actually gives the “powered by” a CSS classname aswell, so you can conceivably style it any way you wish. And if you manage to do something neat with it, do post a link here…

powered by performancing firefox

    After a great beta run, we are pleased to announce the release of Performancing for Firefox 1.2.

    We hope you enjoy this release, as it brings some more key functionallity and stability to performancing to make your blogging even better.

As always, once you’ve given it  a spin, head to the forums and let us know what you think.

Update: I’ve added a section on getting inline spellchecking in Firefox and PFF.

New features in 1.2

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.

Install

Install Performancing Firefox 1.2

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

In previous version of PFF, you would frequently get an error returned from the blogger.com service called Error #3.

We’ve fixed this, and you should now have a much more seemless interaction with blogger.com. Thanks to our community member Theo for helping us with the fix.

Installing Spellcheck

Many have expressed their interest in Spellcheck integration with PFF, please follow the following steps to successfully get inline spellcheck to work in Firefox 1.5.x and PFF.

1. Uninstall any version of Spellbound you have installed then restart firefox.
2. Install this version of spellbound (spellbound-dev_20060108.xpi)
3. Restart Firefox
4. Try typing into a text field and misspell a word, it should now be underlined.
5. It it is, hold the ‘Ctrl-key’ down and left-click on the word to see the suggested spellings
6. If it didn’t work (no red underline), go into the extension manager (Tools->Extensions) and go into the Spellbound preferences and make sure you have a dictionary selected. If you don’t have any dictionaries installed then go HERE to install more dictionaries.

Let us know if you run into any issues.

powered by performancing firefox

Dave Reids PMetrics WordPress Plugin has been very well received but what about users of other blogging systems? Well Drupal is the particular favourite of the Performancing team so I have put together a module for Drupal.

I would love for you to try this module out, have a look at the code and give me some really good feedback.

Features:

• Automatic Metrics script inclusion
• Exclude hits from a specified user role
• Show charts and/or text stats in a “block”
• Choose the blog to show stats for
• Select the chart you wish to display

Due to the change in the way forms work between Drupal 4.6 and 4.7 there are two versions of the code unfortunately. Just download the  appropriate zip for your version and extract and upload to your modules directory.

After enabling the module in your “modules” control panel you should see a new “block” plus “Metrics” under “settings”. You will need to enter your Performancing username and password in the settings, after submitting your user details the remaining settings will appear to allow you to select your blog and display choices.

    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.

We’re in the process of revamping some of the site, mostly to make what you can actually do here more obvious. One of the things I think many miss is that each member has their own blog here. Subject matter is limited to the very broad subject of blogging, and things that affect bloggers, but it’s a great way to get some exposure for your ideas to a large audience.

We have a few good authors here regulary going to the homepage, but I’d love to see more. You can write a post for Performancing in three ways:

1. Simply hit “create content” and choose “blog entry” and away you go..
2. Use Performancing Firefox to post to your Performancing Blog
3. Email me at [email protected] if you would like to have relevant posts from your blog syndicated here

We’re pretty open to ideas, and would LOVE to see more women post, as well as a more diverse section of the membership in general.

So do let me know if you’d like to be a featured author on Performancing.com, and feel free to ask any questions in this thread.

We’ve spent all day today in a thread discussing a very cool new use of the Performancing Metrics API. A neat plugin for Google Desktop.

You can download and try gdPMetrics here courtesty of Performancing member geniosity. There’s also a whole bunch of screenshots on there aswell.

Do let us all know what you think, and if you create cool things with the Metrics API, be sure to let us know. Next week sometime we will put up a dedicated page that will point to all the things folks make!

Well done, and thanks geniosity!

Some months back when the ideas for this site, it’s community and it’s tools were still being formed, we took a long hard look at blog statistics, and thought we could do something different, something better. Something with a little more bollocks.

Several months later, we’re nearing the public beta of a world beating blog statistics service designed by professional bloggers, for professional bloggers.

Performancing Metrics

We’ve been in closed alpha, with a trusted group of friends for a few weeks now, and even as we speak, the system is still being tweaked based on their invaluable feedback, feedback we’re hugely grateful for. We want that to continue with our beta.

As with all our tools, our site, and our services, Performancing Metrics will be shaped by you. As it stands, it rocks, but with help from you guys, it’ll only get better.

I’ll be posting a few more details over the coming days, in the meantime, if you have questions feel free to ask them here in the secure knowledge that they may well go ignored untill nearer the date 🙂

Finally im happy to say we’re out of 007 mode on this, and cant wait to open the public beta next week!

If you’d like to show your support for our Performancing Firefox Blog Editor, or just tell your readers where they can get it, then please feel free to use the images on this page in your blogrolls, sidebars or posts.

Choose an Image

You can just right click and choose “save as” with any of the images below, or even grab a zip of the whole lot so you can play around with them, modify or alter to suit. The zip is posted at the bottom of the page.

The following two sets of images were contributed by Wayde Christie and were the winning entries in our first PFF banners competition.

      

      

Grab the Code

You can use the code below, once you’ve uploaded the image you want, or do anything you like with them.





Get the Zip

If you want a zip of all the images on this page, you can download it here

Made Your Own Banners?

If you’d like ot make your own buttons/banners we’d love to see them! email a zip file of your images to [email protected] and we’ll post the ones we like best on this page.

Thankyou!

Thankyou for your support of PFF, its a great tool, even if we do say so ourselves, and its all down to you. Fueled by your feedback, support and help over the last few months we’ve managed to shape PFF into one of the finest blog editor platforms on the market.

Not only that, it’s free, and will remain free!