For RollerWeblogger folks who blog a lot, the Performancing Blog Editor plugin for Firefox may prove to be just the right tool to take on the road.

Installation and basic configuration went quickly, with one hitch. It wouldn't recognize my account until after, by serendipity, I quit and restarted Firefox (as if installing the plugin for the first time). Otherwise, there was a little experimentation involved:

• Once into the account wizard, it was necessary to choose "Manually Configure."
• At the next screen (Introduction), I selected "Custom Blog."
• Off the resulting menu, I picked "roller" as my blog system and was warned that support was expermental.
• For blog URL, it was important to enter the base URL (http://www.whatever.com/roller/xmlrpc). Entering my own blog's URL (http://www.whatever.com/roller/page/myhandle/xmlrpc) came acropper.
• When Performancing asked for my login and password, they were rejected unless I hit "return" on the keyboard (not the button in the wizard).
• My first attempt to use the editor failed, and I was galled by that, as I indicated above. After restarting Firefox, all was well.

I used it to write the first versions of this post.

At first glance, the split screen view it affords fills me with nostalgia for the early Macintosh text edtors. Yes, it's true. The only computer I love as much as my Mac is my Solaris box.

Semi-automatic tagging for technorati and quick and easy addition to del.icio.us are features that will please my clients. Most get the logic of tagging quickly, yet find the mechanics relentlessly alien.

No matter how strongly Performancing recalls MacWrite to mind for me, my clients are going to find it confusing at first. Their lives are already complex. Until it becomes second nature, one more application is just one more burden.

Not much of a burden though, for most already use Firefox. And most who blog, blog a lot. They blog on the run. They blog with frequent changes in locale and under the pressure of sometimes intense controversy. I suspect they will gain enough in efficiency to make it worth the climb.

My thanks to Dave Johnson for working with the folks at Performancing to help them fit their plugin to RollerWeblogger.

Thanks to Matt Raible for provoking me to give it a try.

Technorati Tags: RollerWeblogger, Firefox, Performancing