While I’m on the topic of blogging tools, it’s worth mentioning Performancing’s new Firefox extension which enables you to draft blog posts from within your browser. Simply hit a pencil icon in the bottom of your browser window and up pops an text editor interface, with standard WYSIWYG buttons, as well as link and image insert controls.

You need to provide the login details for each of your blogs but can post to most platforms including Typepad, Blogger and WordPress. The extension will even download your blog categories. Om Malik thinks it’s ‘awesome’ and Neville Hobson thinks it’s very impressive while noting its absence of a ping service, the ability to add trackbacks to a post and an error in publishing the categories he’d selected. No doubt these can be added and resolved in due course.

I think I’ll stick to ecto since I like the ability to add tags to each post, but I have to agree for a free and lightweight app, it has excellent functonality and a clean interface. I did have one minor problem with adding links which I do while writing a post, whereby the following text also became hyperlinked and had to be edited out in the HTML view. But at least it has an HTML view, so it was easily solved.

This post was written using Performancing for Firefox, so if you are reading this – you know it works.

UPDATE – Category insertion didn’t work for me either in Typepad, so I’m adding them now in the Typepad app. It seemed to recognize the categories when I started editing the post, but they didn’t actually appear on the blog itself.