mamamusings: December 27, 2005

peformancing review

I’ve been hearing a bit lately about the Performancing for Firefox plugin, but my threshhold for new apps is pretty high right now, and it took until today for me to decide to install it. First impressions? Niiiiiiice. The short version of what it does is on their website:

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.

The longer version is that’s it’s a very slick AJAX implementation that gives you a very useful split-screen approach to blogging the page you’re on. Instead of replacing the current page with your editor, or popping up a useless small window, you get the page you were viewing on the top (scrollable), and the Performancing window on the bottom. Decent formatting options, too (though not quite Ecto-quality). Setting up my blog was very simple; the account wizard was straightforward and quick—and I was able to do that after I’d already started writing, which was really nice.

What I really like, though, are two features not listed on their page. First, if I select text on the page I want to blog and right-click, I get a contextual menu that allows me to blog it using Performancing—that brings up the editing window with the page name hyperlinked at the top of the entry window, and the selected text in a blockquote tag below. Very useful. Second, if I don’t publish that entry, and just close up the window, the next time I do the same thing on another page it appends the text to the entry in progress—excellent for blogging a series of sites for a single post.

I suspect I’ll find other nice bells-and-whistles…I haven’t yet tried the “save as note” option on the screen, for example. But I don’t often find tools that are this useful after only 2 minutes of setup, so I thought I’d blog it while my delight was still fresh!

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Update: Ooooo…after I published this entry, I realized that Peformancing also shows me a list of recent entries, and lets me edit them easily. Very nice.

rockin' around the menorah

Yesterday afternoon on NPR’s All Things Considered, I heard a short piece on the spelling of Hanukkah (or is that Chanukah?). It was a lovely little piece, which had a nice interview ith Rabbi Daniel Zemel. But the best part was the mention of a great duo called The LeeVees, who’ve done bunch of what they call “great, rockin’ Hanukah songs.”

You can listen to their music on the web site, and I heartily recommend it—song titles include “Goyim Friends,” “How Do You Spell Channukkahh,” and “Applesauce Vs Sourcream.”

Their album, “Hanukkah Rocks,”  is also available over iTunes…I’m buying it today, to add to my ever-expanding collection of holiday music, which the boys have noted is sadly lacking in “channukkahh” songs.

caution: this medication spoof may cause serious laughter

Via 37 Signals, this side-splittingly funny faux pharmaceutical ad: Panexa (Acidachrome Promanganate). I laughed ‘til I cried.