WriteArea: Use FCKeditor everywhere you want!

How many times you have encountered this: You want to write a blog post - it may be on Blogger, it may be on Xanga, it may be on Wordpress - but the HTML editor provided by the blog site does not do what you want. Say, you want to draw a table with Xanga's HTML editor, which button is that? Well, sorry, there's no such thing. How about making indented list items in Blogger? No can do. Wanting to add a Flash animation in your blog post to spice things up a bit? Well, you need to resort to editing HTML source - a tedious, painful, and error prone process for non-professionals.

Introducing WriteArea

WriteArea is a Firefox plugin that lets you write your blog posts, or anything requiring the use of HTML, with FCKeditor - the most popular web based rich text editor of the world. It is a new Firefox plugin that lets you convert any HTML text areas in any web site into a full-featured FCKeditor editing dialog. With it, you can create tables in your Xanga posts, you can create indented list items in Blogger, you can add Flash animations to your blog posts without fiddling with arcane HTML code, you can have the ability to write things in _subscript and ^superscript, and the ability to edit the properties of tables and images with right click menues... WriteArea is a little plugin gives you a whole world of possibilities in web authoring.

Using WriteArea

WriteArea can be activated from any text area boxes of any website. For blog sites, that is usually the text area provided by the "Edit Source" or "Edit HTML" feature. To give you a rough idea of how WriteArea works, I'll give you an example how I wrote this post with WriteArea in Blogger.

Step 1: Switch to "Edit HTML" in Blogger, and activate the plugin by right clicking on the text area.

Step 2: Write your message in the WriteArea dialog that pops up.

Step 3: Click "Save" in the WriteArea dialog to save the HTML code into the blog site's text area. If you want to edit your post again just right click on the text area and activate WriteArea again.

Step 4: Publish your blog post when you've done editing it.

Getting WriteArea

WriteArea can be downloaded here. Since the plugin is new, it is being sandboxed right now and is available only to registered users in http://addons.mozilla.org. You'll also need to enable showing sandboxed plugins in your user preferences after you've registered and logged into the Mozilla plugin site before downloading it. A plugin being sandboxed also means it is a beta and thus it's likely it will have some bugs. So, be a responsible open source software user, report any bugs you've found and write a favorable review for it if you think it is useful.