Offline Blog Tools
[Update, Nov 28, 2008: This article is probably dated]
Day after each cyber day one’s blog site accumulates link and script moss of the ever growing tweaks and chicklets that festoon one’s blog for good traffic and technique. However, the downside is blog software like wordpress, in their default WYSIWYG editor inteface through which one write all the blog posts online, gets slowed down. One need to wait forever for updating a post with a minor comma. And at times one might actually prefer the comforts of a lap-top and a corner of the home to think and write one’s post (like me) before having to connect to the internet and post it.
An easy solution is to use an offline blog tool that allows one to do all the writing offline and post it to one’s blog site when ready.
I have so far tested four offline blog tools: Bloggar, Performancing, Qumana and Blog Desk .
All of them work and DO update your blogs properly with your posts from your desktop itself…well, almost always…and, as usual, I am dissatisfied with all of them in some ways.
All of these tools are FREE, in general user friendly, support most of the top blog sites; allows access to multiple blogs, selection of categories, reclaiming and editing previously published posts, saving a copy of the posts in your hard disk, tagging, keywords, summary, image upload facility and other minor but nevertheless useful facilities.
Major cribs in all of these tools is that new categories cannot be added to your blogs/posts from them directly and except for Blog Desk uploading of images from the desktop along with the post into your blog is a pain. Comments feed from the blogs are yet to be accessed by any of these tools.
A brief tool specific summary is given below
Ups: Simple and exhaustive editor; Gets any number of posts from the blog to be edited; text-html based formatting is available so you can easily capture and correct formatting mess-ups in posts; built-in spell checker and dictionary; Excerpt facility for each post is available; allows key words
Downs: Sometimes doesn’t update but simply demotes a post as draft; doesn’t support Tamil language (my major crib); no technorati tag support as such but does have generic tagging facility so one can configure it to do this; Image upload is not all that easy; if the “more” tag is used in the post, while reclaiming later for modification, only the content of the post until the place where “more” tag is used, is reclaimed.
Ups: Sits inside your Firefox browser itself; right click inside firefox allows you to send links of pages that you are browsing to your blogging software; providing links and searching for technorati links to the page you are browsing is easy; linking to internet images in your blog post is easy; allows Tamil language typing (my major UP for this tool); has separate keys for technorati tags and del.ic.ious; allows draft posts without actually publishing; Doesn’t have a problem with the “more” tag used in the post and reclaims the post in full.
Downs: setting up image upload from desktop to your blog site gives sometimes problems; sometimes the technorati keys don’t work; formatting at times gets messy and lack of html formatting capabilities becomes irksome; only the few most recent posts can be retrieved for editing and re-posting; no built-in spell-checker; cannot change/access dates and times of posts; No excerpt facility for each post is available; when the link-words in a posts are clicked for editing or checking where they are linked to, the original link goes off - really annoying
Ups: Colorful and compact; decent editor; special keys for technorati tags; seems to allow Tamil language (according to the Quamana support group) although I couldn’t get it right; spell-checker; Excerpt facility for each post is available; allows Q-ads to be placed in posts (whether this is Ups or Downs depends on one’s perspective); dates and time can be changed; good enough drag-drop facilitated image uploading facility; source view allows direct html formatting
Downs: needs java software inside your desktop for proper functioning (major crib); slows down computers with low RAM (I checked with four computers with RAM varying from 128 MB to 2 GB); image upload is not easy; formatting at times gets messy
Ups: Simple and functional editor although not as exhaustive as Bloggar; gets any number of previous posts from the blog site for editing; great image uploading facility from the desktop straight into your post without doing any additional configuring (the only one that works correctly for me); allows notes to be taken in a separate editor; frequently used phrases can be stored and reproduced with a hotkey; allows technorati tags with hotkey; allows html formatting; allows dates and time of posts to be changed; Excerpt facility for each post is available; when link-words are clicked upon, opens into a window with the link text in place, unlike Performancing - great;
Downs: No Tamil language typing possible (my major crib); cannot obviously handle Performancing features of sending pages that you browse or page-links directly to the post that you would like to blog but that is obvious and true for the other three tools as well. If the “more” tag is used in the post, while reclaiming later for modification, only the content of the post until the place where “more” tag is used, is reclaimed.
I like Performancing for its great interface with Firefox and allowing me to type in Tamil. Bloggar and Blog Desk are simple and easy. While Bloggar provides an exhaustive editor that is useful sometimes, Blog Desk allows me to upload images directly into my post from the desktop, a feature that is not working that easily with the other tools. I don’t use Java in most of my computers including my lap-top.
So, except Qumana, I would be using the rest of them anyway.
Disclaimer: Like these tools itself, these are my FREE personal opinions and I am not paid by anyone of these guys for saying them (although I wish). I don’t get along with computers very well and I guess the feeling is mutual and unbinding. So, one need not believe in my judgment, as these tools might actually be (mis)behaving (im)personally with me alone!
Tags: Blog Tools, BlogDesk, Bloggar, Firefox, Offline Blogging, Performancing, Qumana, Tamil Blogs, Tamil Language, Technorati
