I’ve just installed Performancing, a Firefox extension and blogging tool, and I have to say I am not impressed. I’m writing and publishing this post with it now and it looks like a good WYSIWYG editor but it is no different than the editor that is bundled with WordPress. Maybe for those who user Movable Type will find it useful but I am 99.99% positive that MT does have a WYSIWYG editor too. Hell, Blogger has one and its free and in serious neglect by Google.

Go to Performancing’s site to see a list of features which you may or may not find interesting. Nothing really stands out for me except one flaw: No spell check.

Supposedly, there is support for the spell check that comes with Firefox 2.0 but since I don’t run it, I don’t get to use that feature. And its not a feature of Performancing, really. Its a Firefox feature.

I suppose the thing I could say about the extension is this: It combines a few features into one platform but doesn’t do them well enough to convince me to not use all the apps it intents to replace.

For example, it has built in del.icio.us support which I can do on my own or with a different Firefox extension. I don’t tag my own posts in del.icio.us because I’m not into to that kind of shameless promotion – I shamelessly promote myself in other ways.

I mentioned the technorati tags earlier but, again, that can all be controlled with a plugin for WordPress. If MT, Blogger, and the other systems it supports doesn’t have that, then this might be useful but for me and my WP blog, its not all that helpful.

There is built in FTP support and image uploading but what system doesn’t have at least image uploading?

You can manage multiple blogs (using different CMS types) all in one place – that is helpful. But Flock can do that and it comes with a spell checker!!

Sorry I keep mentioning that. I can’t get over that missing feature. If Performancing had one, I’d using it all the time in a heartbeat.

Anyway, I’m giving it this shot… and if you think it could be helpful, then you should too. But I still believe that you can do more with either the standard interfaces the blogging systems offer you or with extra tools you can download and incorporate yourself.