Should I use ScribeFire?

ScribeFire at scribefire.com has been around for a long time, and I have used it before. Its current version is called "ScribeFire Next",
the one I test here was announced  Sep 12, 2011. I use Google Chrome, so I installed the ScribeFire extension 
through the Chrome Tools menu. Registering my blog (this one here) as the first step after clicking on the new icon in next to the
browsers' address window was easy.
There is a "Start a new post" link that does what it says. Nice and easy. I like the clean full-page layout with a format toolbar
similar to that of a simple text editor. 

Now for the requirements:

Including code

I found a link directly above the format toolbar called "Edit Code (HTML and Markdown)".  Curiously, I clicked on it. This certainly uglified the view of my text, but apparently it lets me use Markdown,  and according to Wikipedia's description http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#Code I should be able to include code by preceding each code line with at least 4 spaces. Here's what that looks like:

import unittest
from FindMatchingLines import *

class TestFindMatchingLines(unittest.TestCase):
def setUp(self):
       self.text = ''
       for i in range(0,100):
           self.text += 'Line {!r}\n'.format(i)

       self.patNone = 'xxx'
       self.patAll = 'Line [0-9]+'
       self.pat10 = 'Line [1-9]0'

Aha, works halfway. But by switching to "Edit Code (HTML and Markdown)" I see the html tags got misplaced. So correcting this as in

import unittest
from FindMatchingLines import *
class TestFindMatchingLines(unittest.TestCase):
def setUp(self):
       self.text = ''
       for i in range(0,100):
           self.text += 'Line {!r}\n'.format(i)

       self.patNone = 'xxx'
       self.patAll = 'Line [0-9]+'
       self.pat10 = 'Line [1-9]0'

I get the whole thing to be displayed in code (yes, that's Python). Now, what you see is not the original style for code blocks which just applies courier-typeface to everything between the pre and code tags. I have fancified that by adding custom CSS to the Blogger template. How? Next post. For now let's look at the other requirements.

Ease of use - Can it handle markdown

Yes it can, in the "Edit Code (HTML and Markdown)" edit mode. What happens however is that upon clicking edit visually this markdown gets converted to HTML, and then switching back to HTML and markdown doesn't convert it back to markdown but shows you the tedious HTML code. I find that medium nice. If I had to make a Pugh matrix on it I'd give it a 0 for neutral. One way around this is that you start in markdown mode and never leave it. But there's no way around seeing the html version of your markdown in markdown mode during later edits.

How about images

That's really easy in visual edit mode, just click the insert/add image button in the formatting toolbar.

Web snippets

Haven't figured it out yet :-(

Immediate post

That's good - there's a post button at the bottom right, and a dialog appears asking me to view the post.

Am I wowed?

Overall, no. The feature set is still pretty basic. On the positive side, I haven't found a bug yet!