So once gain I’m playing around with blog clients.

I was using MS Live Writer, but since I’m upgrading the work lappy to Windows 7(woo!) I tried it in 7…and it’s kinda ass. Also, for some reason, some of the plugins don’t seem to be installing, or if they install, they’re not working.

Also, it’s not really that portable. I would need a seperate install and config per computer. And since I could either blog from the couch or the basement, it would be nice to be able to plop it in dropbox and run it from there.

I want to say that it’s amazing that there’s not more offline blogging software, but I suspect it’s a bit of a niche market that really didn’t grow. In fact, of the ones I’ve found, very few have been updated in the last few years. LiveWriter being the exception.

Initially I tried Zoundry Raven. It’s got a good interface, saves posts offline, and allows for a portable install. It also, nativly, allows to post to more than one blog at a time. This requires a plugin for LiveWriter. So I setup the wordpress and LJ account, and start blogging. And publish. And LJ doesn’t get published to.

Hmm

Try again, same problem.

Now, there are two servers that LJ can publish from, so I try both, and they just give different errors.

Arg.

But really, who reads LJ anymore? Just in case, I’m now trying BlogDesk. It seems to be ok, and with a little tweeking, I have it running from dropbox properly. It does all the things Raven did, and seems to be lighter and faster.

Don’t know yet if it’ll publish to LJ, this post will be the test.

UPDATE: Nope, for some reason it’s not. I suspect it has something to do with the age of the client and I’m sure the LJ API has been updated since, well, 2006 😉

UPDATE AGAIN: Since I started writing this, I’ve tried a couple others.

w.blogger has the benifit of having a portable version, so I can just unzip it and pop it into Dropbox. Howeve,r like the rest, it hasn’t been updated in ages. The current version being released in 2007. It does allow(in theory) to post to both WP and LJ, although I haven’t tried it yet for LJ. The wizard to add accounts is nice, and while it should allow to publish to more than one account, you have to switch back and forth between them instead of a single option. There is a tool to publish to more than one account, but it assumes that the multiple accounts are of the same blog software. For instance two WP accounts or two LJ accounts, not one of each.

And lastly(for now anyway) there’s ScribeFireNext, which is browser based. Once again, it will allow to publish to more than one account, just not at the same time. Mind you, switching back and forth between accounts is much easier than w.blogger. Also, it’s still being worked on and has updates this month 🙂 So it should actually work with LJ if I need it to. It will import the blog settings based on the URL of the blog, so that’s helpful as well. It’s one annoying feature so far is it seems to pop up ‘ads’ every now and then on the side panel. But otherwise, it works nicely. And I suppose I could install it to a portable version of FF….

So yea, new(to me) blog tools. I just didn’t like the default one for WordPress.

That, and offline writing makes life a little easier.

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Filed under: Blog - @ September 20, 2011 12:30 pm