For anyone who’s blogging with Typepad and using Firefox as their browser, you’re at a distinct disadvantage to those who use Internet Explorer. You can’t use one of Typepad’s fine features, Quickpost (which mirrors Blogger.com’s BlogThis) which is unfortunately only usable with IE. I’ve asked Typepad to have mercy on us Firefox users and come up with an FF compatible Quickpost feature. Nothing doing. I asked in the Firefox discussion forum for some enterprising programmer to come up with a FF compatible version of Quickpost.
Now along come the McDonald brothers of Vpop Technologies, who’ve developed the Firefox Typepad Toolbar. It provides you not only with Quickpost (which they awkwardly call BlogThis, showing their Blogger.com-centrism), but you can access your blog admin area, your weblogs themselves, and your photo albums all from the same toolbar. There is also a search engine feature which allows you to access various search engines of your choosing. I find this a less useful item.
Why is Quickpost so important to me? I blog often about news items I find on the web. Having an easy way to highlight text and turn it into both a post and a viable hyperlink at the same time is a godsend. And I’ve been missing this since I saw the light and deserted IE for Firefox about a year ago. I’m so happy to have Quickpost back in my blogging arsenal!
If you’re a Typepad/Firefox user, download the Firefox toolbar. It’s a great tool.
One small but serious quibble: the developers of this toolbar call a feature in the Typepad/FF toolbar “BlogThis.” The feature is called Quickpost in Typepad and if they want Typepad users to recognize the feature in this toolbar, they should call it by that name; and not the name that blogger.com uses for it.
