Oct 07 2005
Testing out blog clients
Posted by paul
The built-in WordPress client is OK, but I thought I’d check out some alternative blog clients, both for Fedora and Windows.
For GNU/Linux:
- BloGTK – starts up; logs in but then says there’s an error when trying to connect.
- Drivel – starts up but can’t connect to our blog’s Atom feed.
- Gnome Blog – starts up and appears to connect, but can’t post.
- mtsend is a command line tool for Movable Type, so it’s a non-starter
Not good – none of them want to connect to my WordPress blog. 
For Windows:
- BlogJet = US$39.95
- Blogohost – it’s a blog host, not a client!
- Qumana – installed; logs in and I’m posting the Japanese Grand Prix qualifying notes with it
- Post2Blog – posts from Word (blurgh!) and isn’t free
- SharpMT – requires MS-.NET v2BETA
- w.bloggar installed; test post OK; re-posted GP qualifying notes as a comparison.
Qumana and w.bloggar both work; both have a fairly extensive GUI with lots of buttons; w.bloggar produces better output though – Qumana’s code is a mess, so I’d never be able want to fix it up via any other client.
Hi,
Good selection of clients. We have a Windows based client – Blog Writer. You can download it from http://www.zoundry.com (I am from Zoundry).
Are you planing on testing out any clients on the Mac platform? In that case, check out Ecto – I have heard good things about it – though never tried it (I am Wintel). They also have a wintel client.
Priyantha: I finally got around to downloading Zoundry and trying it out – quite nice, but seems to add spurious line breaks (<br>) at the end of my posts. I’ll alternate between Zoundry and w.bloggar for a bit until there’s a clear favourite.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for trying out. Yeah – the tag at the end is bug
. We initially used the IE editor control out the box – which inserts tag for each carriage return (enter key) – which is sort of correct (mark up structure wise) – how ever most of our users are non technical – and did not like the extra space between lines (the space between ). (these users were trying to do their layout spacings by pressing the enter key ala MS Word).
So, we configured the IE editor to use each time the enter key is press. This solved the “line space” issue for most issues, but some (myself included) did like having empty div tags for each line break. So, we decided to programatically alter the IE document model to dynamically use tags – which has this glitch you now see.
Personally, I prefer to have some structural mark up i.e. go back to using but use an approach similar to most online editors do. ie. two (or three) line breaks in a row translates to a start of a new paragraph. This probably will effect some users who use carriage returns to add line spacing (especially around images/wrap around text). This is one of the pit falls of using a wyswyg editor – not much control (relatively speaking).
Hopefully, once we have a html souce code editor, power users will be able to take over where wyswyg left off – or switch between a wyswyg and w.Bloggar
ps: if you do come across any issues/bugs/comments etc., we would really appreciate it if you coud post it to our forums at http://forums.zoundry.com
Thanks
Oops! I forgot to escape some character.
Wanted to say IE control initially used <p> (para) tags for line breaks. i.e. line break consisted of a empty paragraph.
Second time around, IE control was configured to use <div> (div). In this case, line breaks were empty div tags which solved the line space issue for the wysiwyg users but it is really bad (and ugly) html.
Current solution dynamically modifies the IE html document model to use br tags for line breaks (buggy!)
Thanks for giving Qumana a try and you really should try out the new version launched today. We’ve created a way to insert keyword-driven ad into any post with one click.
Please see http://www.qumana.com and blog.qumana.com for more information.
Thanks for your trial of Qumana – the code is the number 1 annoyance for us. We need to take out and replace the entire editor portion. And we are
I’m glad you liked everything else we offer and can’t wait to have you back trying us out when we meet your standards. Thanks for the feedback!
I can attest to echo kicking some ass. It’s a good client.
As to SharpMT – there’s also a non-.NET 2.0 Beta 2 client, but that one requires .NET 1.1. That’s the price that I’m willing to pay for fast development time and smoother integration with other libraries…
And I’m pretty sure it will work with WordPress – it was designed for MovableType blogs and I’ve heard WordPress is very similar in their interface.
Having discovered the correct URL for my blog’s XML-RPC support, I thought I’d give the Linux clients another bash.
* blogtk connects OK; posting doesn’t seem to work – even though the client doesn’t report any problems, the terminal from which I started blogtk has a glut of message which I can’t be bothered to decipher. Nothing appeared in the blog and the user interface gave no clue as to why.
* drivel connects OK once I lie and say it’s a Movable Type blog; it downloads the categories (which I don’t think blogtk did). The test entry was posted correctly, but the GUI is really bland. There’s also a (potential) problem with the initial Journal Login screen because it uses the Username as the key, which means if I want to use Drivel to post to two different blogs (e.g. WordPress and LiveJournal) I can’t if I use the same username on both. D’oh! It does, however, show me a list of recent posts, which is nice.
* gnome-blog-poster – if drivel’s GUI was bland, this defies description! With just two formatting buttons (bold & italic), Add Link and Preferences, this has got to be the worst GUI ever! It’s not fair to compare it to the Windows clients, because they are just miles ahead. Pathetic. I’m not even going to bother seeing if it posts properly because I’d never use it. Absolutely horrible.
So, as much as I want to dump my Windows PC and only use my Linux box (although it’s not going to happen until I can get my games moved over), it looks like I’d be stuck with the WordPress web page for updating my blog. The Windows clients win hands down. Linux comes in for a lot of criticism about user interfaces and it pains me to say that this is the worst case I’ve seen.
Sorry if one of the developers is reading this; I know you do it for free/fun, but the Windows clients (that I looked at) are free too – take a look at your competition and you’ll see I’m not being unfair.
I came across a blogging client called Elicit which shows your posts in a calendar format; it’s aimed at people who blog for money(!!) but it would be nice if other clients adopt similar layout possibilities.
I just set up a blog on my local computer and was testing out things before using a public server. Naturally, one of the first things I wanted to do was get a client.
My experiences here on Linux (my primary OS) wasn’t good either. Most blog clients required GNOME (yuck!), so I didn’t make it very far with those. However unlike for you, mtsend worked fine for me once I figured out the quirks of the mt import syntax.
I also tried some Windows clients under WINE, but wasn’t impressed. They were non-free (as in speech), required IE (double yuck!) or both.
Personally, I think I’m going to stick with mtsend.py until its suckiness becomes apparent. Actually it’s a nice concept: create plain text files and spell check them now, and then do a batch upload in the background later. If only passwords were encoded…
Just an FYI: SharpMT 3 was released for the released version of the .NET Framework in October… also 2.6 is still available for 1.1 – not many feature differences between them, so it’s an either or type thing.
Even though I tried a bunch of clients, I’ve found I almost always go back to the web-based WordPress page to post.
I liked the LiveJournal clients (“semagic” and “logjam”) because they gave me a bit more then LJ’s own posting page, but the WP one is pretty good.