Battleangel | Personal

Desktop Blogging Clients is pretty much the only reason I keep blogging. I can’t stand browsers with javascript solutions (even if they have gotten better). Time to get a fresh perspective on the playing field. Is w.bloggar still the number one solution? Obviously price isn’t an issue for us immaterial non-believers. That is of course if one is even able to find a keygen, serial, crack or whatever. Or indeed a tool that is even worth copyright infringement. So far it’s looking bleak.

The main reason I’m doubting w.bloggar is its mangling of WordPress dates when saving edited posts. And its lack of updates. Eventually, I will compare these tools to see how they fare with both Nucleus and WordPress.

Tools for win32

1. blogBuddy (Slightly basic, dead)
2. Zempt (Slightly defunct)
3. w.bloggar
4. Ecto
5. Qumana Tried an early beta and found it to be a load of crap frankly. Big round shiny buttons that wouldn’t go away. Rich text mode only as far as I could tell. Very shallow, very bad.
6. SharpMT Error when fetching WordPress posts. Only one account profile AFAICT. MS.net framework 2.0. Clean and neat though.
7. Rocketpost
8. Elicit
9. Zoundry Blog Writer
10. PostXING Development release.
11. WB Editor
12. Post2Blog
13. Chrysanth WebStory
14. IMHO Instant Blogger
15. Blogjet
16. bTonga Development release. MS.net framework 2.0.
17. BlogDesk
18. Windows Live Writer
19. Word 2007

Other platform clients are listed at Wikipedia.

Wish list:

• Must handle non-ASCII, extended, whatever chars (plus general XHTML compliance including ampersand in URI).
• Must upload files via FTP. XMLRPC upload would be nice, but I have frankly never used it.
• Must have “custom tags” (like w.bloggar). I.e. macro presets to put it another way where you can define your own tags and or series of tags for easy access.
• Allow tag / source editing, not just WYSIWYG. In fact source editing is preferred.
• Access and edit old posts in a rational manner. Would be nice to do as SharpMT does. I.e. append the titles of post to a local list when they’re posted so that you don’t have to fetch the last 10, or last 20 or whatever. Some sort of bookmarking for really important or often edited posts would be snazzy too.
• Preview mode, with either IE or Firefox using local or server stylesheets.
• Spell checking, preferably as you type.
• Ability to set either BR o P tags for breaks/paragraphs in WYSIWYG or preferably send the code “clean” with just “\r\n” or however that works. Not an issue when editing the code obviously.
• Clean, simple interface and not bloatware but that goes without saying. Minimal loading time like w.bloggar.
• Better post loading / saving than w.bloggar, perhaps via a sidebar manager or at least the ability to have several documents open at once in tabs. Even if the posts are to go into different accounts / blogs.
• Must handle multiple servers with multiple blogs / accounts and at the very least work with Nucleus and WordPress without any major hickups.