For those using the beta QuickAds client, it is a hit or miss proposition in many cases. If Scribefire can make edits to your website, the whole experience is completely seamless. You just click “add site” and you can easily start dragging and dropping ads onto your page. There is no delay, and everything is happening in real time.

On the other boat though, is those whom Scribefire can’t make edits. If you get asked to copy and paste code after the </body> tag, this would be you. In this case, your experience is significantly worse. Dragging and dropping ads gets delayed by up to 15 minutes. You have to go into your file manager and speficially edit a file. It is even hard to figure out exactly which file and where to make the edit.

Well, this post is for all those in that second boat. In order to jump ships (and become one of those who are using the easy Scribefire), all you have to do in your wordpress install is to change the permissioning of a single file. If you go into your file manager, and edit the permission of the footer.php file of your theme (which can be found in wp-content/themes/yourtheme/footer.php). The permission can be set to 777 then you can join the masses in having a pleasureable experience. If you change all the files permissions, in the future, you can edit your themes directly from wordpress!

As I have been doing a lot of what can be considered “Support” issues, I get a number of common issues.

One of the most common is definitely the “I can’t log in using Scribefire, but I can log in fine from the web page”.

In this case, the two most prevalent reasons are:

1. When entering a blog, instead of just clicking the “Next >” button, the person would click “Configure Manually”. Then, from the list, the most common choice is “Wordpress.com”. Since they are actually using their own install of wordpress, they actually aren’t on wordpress.com and so get invalid login/password.

For this case, adding the blog without clicking “Configure Manually” fixes the problem.

2. The second complaint is one I just figured out, and is the impetus of this post. It seems, for whatever reason, a blog may not have the xmlrpc publishing option checked and this is causing problems. In order to turn on xmlrpc publishing, the user should go under Settings -> Writing, and check the checkbox next to “XML RPC Publishing”.

So, where have I been and what have I been doing?

It can all be summarized here.

Long story short. I am part of a group which is building a whole new ad network focused completely around the blogger. With today’s private launch, that includes the original ScribeFire tool, which allowed a blogger to post directly from Firefox. This also now includes the new QuickAd ability, which allows simple drag and drop of ads directly onto a site. The most amazing part of it is that you never have to leave firefox to do any of this.

This is just the first in a long line of functionality improvements to both the addon and to the website. We already have improvements in the pipeline.

Expect more to come.