Performancing 1.1


The Performancing extension for Firefox was just updated, and they added some great new stuff. It's now tied into del.icio.us, and adds a "Page Tools" view that looks up the current web page in Technorati (handy, but no handier than a bookmarklet).

Firefox is still not quite as nice as Safari, so I don't think I'll be using it full time (page scrolling performance in Firefox is terrible on my 'book, and text rendering isn't quite as nice as in Safari). Maybe I'll try it for a few days to see how it works out.

The beauty of keeping all bookmarks in del.icio.us is that it completely commoditizes the browser. My bookmarks are completely portable. The only links/tools that get left behind are the bookmarklets I keep in a browser's bookmark toolbar, and those are easily replaced.

Two things that they could add to make Performancing rock harder would be:

  1. Sorting categories. 285 categories and counting, and it's hard to find specific categories for a post (where did "performancing" go in this unsorted mess?)
  2. Category search. Even with sorting, it would be handy to be able to search/filter categories. Maybe it's a tool that only shows up if a blog has more than 20 categories or something... It took me longer to find the categories for this post than to write it.

One thing that strikes me is just how much faster/easier/more flexible adding categories is through the WordPress web UI, when combined with the Cat2Tag plugin - it is a simple text entry field, similar to del.icio.us or Flickr, with autocompletion of existing categories and seamless creation of new ones as needed. It even provides a sorted and weighted tag cloud view of existing categories if desired. No idea if adding categories is even possible via the posting API, but it keeps me coming back to the WordPress posting UI...

Update: Disabling Firefox's "live scrolling" makes it feel about 6 bajillion times faster. It's totally usable now. I'll try it for a week or so (again)...


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