Semagic is a free blogging client for Windows (released under the GPL) that works with a number of blogging systems, including Movable Type. It’s being examined here as part of a more comprehensive look at blogging clients for Windows and Movable Type.
Installation of Semagic was simple and quick, taking only a few clicks. A spelling dictionary has to be downloaded and installed separately. Once installed, the software can be launched automatically, at which point a login screen appears: 
This login screen is designed to log you into a LiveJournal account by default. Since I’m not using Live Journal, I knew this wouldn’t work. I went to the File menu and found “Server Settings” which I used to specify the URL of my site, the path to the XML RPC CGI, the user name and password to use, the MetaWeblog API, and UTF-8 encoding. 
For some reason, after I saved this information it seemed to remember the password but forget the username. 
I ended up having to enter this information again before clicking “Login”. I got an error at that point. Looking back at the server settings, I found that some of them had been lost or forgotten by the software.
After changing the API back to MetaWeblog and clicking Login, I was finally in.
Once I’d gotten past the initial configuration glitches, I was able to work with the software. It recognized by blogs as “Journals” and offered access to the subject, body, excerpt, trackback, category, tags, and date/time fields. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be able to download the list of categories for my blogs, so I was unable to automatically select one. 
In general, I found Semagic as easy to use from this point on as any blogging tool. When I entered a future date for the time stamp, it intuitively interpreted this as a scheduled post in Movable Type. When I submitted the post, Semagic correctly scheduled it to appear at a future date as I would expect. Unfortunately, because it couldn’t download the category list, I wasn’t able (even by manually entering the category) to get it to place a post where it was supposed to go.
I looked through some of the other features after this, but I didn’t spend a great deal of time on them because there were already too many problems getting the tool work with Movable Type.
Here’s how Semagic 1.7.3.3 fared against my wish list of blogging client features:
- Both WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing of entries: Semagic allows for both WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing of entries. All the basic formatting features I tend to use are there in the WYSIWYG mode. The raw HTML editor is nothing more than a plain text editor featuring the HTML code. There is no syntax highlighting or any other features that simplify this type of work.
- Ability to create and store blog entries when offline: While Semagic does allow you to save entries to the local hard drive when you’re not ready to post them, there appear to be some bugs in this. You can only save an entry out when in WYSIWYG editing mode and if there is an entry already loaded in the editor window, you can’t seem to abandon it in favor of opening up a saved entry.
- Spell Checking: This is available as a separate install.
- Post-dating of blog entries: This feature worked as I would want it to in Movable Type. Blog posts given a date later than the current date were stored as scheduled posts and not made active. This allows you to write and save a post that doesn’t get published until the desired date and time.
- Access to multiple blogs: Semagic handled my multiple blogs just fine.
- Access to all my article categories: Semagic appeared to contain support for this, but I was unable to make the functionality actually work. It would appear to go out to the server to collect the categories for a particular blog, but I had no way to select one of those categories for my article and had to manually enter a valid one. It also appeared that the manually entered category information never made it to the server.
- Support for keywords, excerpts, and tags fields: Semagic handles the excerpt and tags fields, but not the keywords field.
- Automated image and file uploads: Given the other issues I ran into, I didn’t test this feature.
- Netbook screen support: Semagic handled an 800×600 resolution well, with no loss of functionality.
- Microsoft Windows support: Semagic installed quickly and ran well with no crashes on an XP Pro system.
- Portability: This option wasn’t tested due to the other bugs and problems seem with this software.
Semagic seems to have a number of bugs when interfacing with Movable Type sites. Even ignoring that, I’ve seen other free blog clients that provide a better list of features.
