Archive for the ‘Blogging Resources’ Category
Coming Up With a Blog or Domain Name
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on March 7th, 2009
I read an article recently that claimed the best domain names are those which combine two memorable words. It gave examples like:
- face + book = Facebook.com
- user + friendly = Userfriendly.org
- new + egg = Newegg.com
- word + press = Wordpress.com
- app + deploy = Appdeploy.com
If you’re looking to name your blog and/or domain, here’s my recommendation for an easy way to come up with a good name.
First, sit down and think about the topic or topics that you’re going to blog about on your site. For example, let’s say you want to write a blog about the Ford Mustang. Start by writing down as many “interesting” words you can think of that relate to the Mustang and cars. You will likely end up with a list like this:
- car
- muscle
- Mustang
- pony
- dipstick
- battery
- gasoline
- oil
- fuel
- tire
- hubcap
- steering
- windshield
- shifter
- intake
- sunroof
- spark
- alternator
- radiator
With your word list in front of you, start pairing up the words you’ve written down to see how they sound. For instance:
- intakespark
- radiatormuscle
- ponyshifter
You may find a pair of words that sound kind of silly together, or which happen to sum up what you’re planning to blog about. Once you have some pairs that work, try registering them as “.com”, “.org”, etc. to see if they’re available.
BlogDesk 2.8 for Windows and Movable Type
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on February 20th, 2009
This time around we’ll be looking at the free BlogDesk blog management software to see what it has to offer. This is another installment in our series of reviews of various blogging clients for Windows.
Installation and Configuration
BlogDesk is easily installed on a system, requiring only a few mouse clicks. Configuration is slightly more involved. It begins with the “Blog Wizard”, which asks for the name of your blog:
This can be any name that’s meaningful to you. It doesn’t have to be the domain name or even the actual name of the blog, though that may make the most sense.
Next, you’re asked for the web address of the blog:
Here you’ll enter the domain name of your site.
Then you’ll be asked what type of blog it is:
Then you’ll be asked for the Entry Point or the location of the mt-xmlrpc.cgi script on the blog server.
Then, the software will need to identify the “blog id” of the blog you’ll be editing. Clicking the “Get Blog ID” button will connect to your server and attempt to retrieve a list of blogs you can pick from.
Now, a list of Categories can be downloaded.
BlogDesk will then attempt to upload and download a sample image to your blog.
After that, you’ll get a confirmation screen and the configuration is finished.
Writing and Publishing Posts
You’ll create your posts in the editor, pictured below:
This editor has all the usual features like bold, italic, underline, justification, indent/outdent, bulleted lists, numbered lists, and font formatting. You can also create hyperlinks and insert images. And yes, there’s a spell checker.
You can use existing categories from your blog and assign your post to them.
If you change the date and time to a later date, the software will publish the entry as a scheduled entry in Movable Type and it won’t appear on your blog until the scheduled date and time arrive.
I was able to create this post in BlogDesk and submit it to the server, complete with images.
Unfortunately, BlogDesk seems to have a flaw in that it doesn’t submit your post in the category you select. Instead, your category is placed in the Keywords field and the post is left without a category on the server. That’s a show-stopper of a flaw for me because it means I’d have to manually edit every post on the server to put it in its proper category.
The editor also provides no support for the keywords, excerpt, and tags fields in Movable Type, which is another strike against it.
Conclusion
Once I found a show-stopper with BlogDesk, I didn’t take a lot of time to evaluate its other features. Nevertheless, here’s what I found in a cursory run through the software based on my requirements.
- Both WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing of entries: Both types of editors are present. The HTML editor is a straight text editor like Windows Notepad, with no syntax highlighting or other features. The WYSIWYG editor contains all the features I’m looking for, but not as many as I’ve seen in some of the other tools.
- Ability to create and store blog entries when offline: Not only will this tool store entries you’ve created offline, it will also optionally pull down all the articles you have online, so that you can refer to them or edit them as desired.
- Spell checking: The product does have spell checking but I didn’t test it.
- Post-dating of blog entries: This feature exists and works intuitively, making post-dated blog entries become Movable Type scheduled entries so you can post something today and not have it show up until later.
- Access to multiple blogs: This feature is present in the software, and isn’t too difficult to work with. It’s not quite as fast or intuitive as some of the others I’ve looked at, but it works well.
- Access to all my article categories: While the software does in fact recognize all my article categories, it doesn’t implement them as Movable Type categories. This flaw is a show-stopper for me.
- Support for keywords, excerpts, and tags: Unless I missed something, this feature does not exist in the software. While not a deal-breaker it’s definitely a big disappointment.
- Automated image and file uploads: This feature worked well and provided all the functionality I need.
- Netbook screen support: Based on my Asus Eee PC 1000H’s screen resolution of 1024×600, this tool would work just fine. I tested it even at 800×600 resolution and was able to access all functionality.
- Microsoft Windows support: The tool runs fine under Windows, generally responds quickly, and didn’t crash in my testing.
- Portability: I didn’t test this feature after I ran into the show-stopper.
This may actually be very close to my ideal client. It would give me access to all my posts offline, allow me to store posts for later submission when I’m online, does scheduled posts correctly, imports my categories, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn’t put articles where they should be on the blog, and that’s just not acceptable to me.
PowerBlog 2.4.30.0 Blogging Client and Movable Type
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on February 10th, 2009
This is another installment in our look at Windows blogging clients for Movable Type. This time around we’ll be looking at PowerBlog, an open source blogging application.
PowerBlog’s claims to fame are its extensibility and Outlook-style browsing interface. Since PowerBlog is free software, it would make an excellent choice if it meets my criteria well.
I got PowerBlog installed and began to configure it. After multiple crashes and blue-screens, I decided to see if there was some online help I could utilize to sort out my problems. It was then I discovered the notice on SourceForge indicating that PowerBlog is now defunct.
According to the author, xiaoth, “PowerBlog is completely dead, it won’t run and certainly will not compile on any modern system due to incompatibilities with .NET Framework 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6.0/7.0/8.0. [snip] PowerBlog isn’t just dead in functionality, it became outdated.”
So I guess this review will end here.
Bytescout Post2Blog 3.01 Blogging Client Software for Windows
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on February 7th, 2009
Bytescout Post2Blog is a free blogging client for Microsoft Windows that works with a large number of content management systems, including Movable Type. Although it is listed on the vendor’s web site as freeware, it does contain “trial” nag screens.
As part of the ongoing series of articles on this site looking at blogging clients for Windows and Movable Type, the following review is presented.
Installation of Post2Blog was quick and easy, requiring only a few mouse clicks. Configuration required me to specify that I already had a blog:
Then, what the URL to that blog is:
The type of content management system in use:
The location of the XML RPC interface script:
My username:
How I wanted images in my articles handled:
And at this point I was ready to begin using the software. First, however, I chose to click the “Update Blogs and Categories” link to pull down the latest blog entries and categories from all my sites. This went very quickly and left me able to work with all my existing sites.
Editing and Posting
Editing articles in Post2Blog is very similar to other tools. On the left side is a text editor with a variety of formatting options, including all the ones I’m likely to use:
Post2Blog also allows access to the categories, date and time (allowing for scheduled publishing of articles at a future date and time), support for the Movable Type “Excerpt” field, trackbacks/pings, and comments.
The editor also allows for something called “Quick Snippets”. If you type a specific phrase, you can associate that phrase with a snippet and have it automatically inserted. For example, you might type “StdWarr” and Quick Snippets would instantly insert your standard warranty text for you. Below is what happened the first time I typed “Post2Blog” into the software.
The editor also allows you to manipulate the HTML directly. It’s not as robust as some I’ve seen, but it’s quite usable.
Inserting an image into a post with Post2Blog was reasonably easy to do. First, you click the “Insert Image” button. You’ll be asked to select an image file:
Then, a “collapsible” menu is displayed, allowing you to set the alternate text for the image, put a caption with it, adjust its size and/or create a thumbnail, change its layout settings, and rounding or shadow effects.
When you upload the post to the server, the image is uploaded with it, using the Movable Type XML-RPC API to handle it automatically.
Once included in your text, the image can be resized manually if desired.
Unfortunately, this is where Post2Blog fell down for me. It got to the 32% mark of posting to my blog and seemed to stop. When it was finished, the only message available to me was “There was an error while publishing”. That wasn’t exactly helpful.
I tried updating my Movable Type installation to the latest version, which has some XML-RPC interface fixes in it, but that didn’t help. The software still got to the 32% mark and failed.
I should note that although I received an error on each post, the posts did in fact make it to the server along with the images, so it’s not a total loss. It’s just that I don’t have a lot of confidence in a tool that is spewing error messages at me on a rather basic function.
How did Bytescout’s Post2Blog stand up to my wish list of features for a Windows blogging client for Movable Type? Let’s look…
- Both WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing of entries:
Post2Blog 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. Still it’s good enough for me. - Ability to create and store blog entries when offline: The software has this capability, which is a good thing since the error messages I got each time I tried to post an entry concerned me.
- Spell Checking: This feature worked well for me in my testing.
- Post-dating of blog entries: I was able to create and submit posts with Post2Blog to be seen online at a later date and time, as I wanted to be able to do.
- Access to multiple blogs: Post2Blog handled my multiple blogs just fine.
- Access to all my article categories: Post2Blog was able to handle my categories fine.
- Support for keywords, excerpts, and tags fields: Post2Blog supports excerpts but does not appear to support keywords or tags.
- Automated image and file uploads: This feature appeared to work flawlessy, submitting my pictures to the server and inserting them into the post as I requested.
- Netbook screen support: Post2Blog handled an 800×600 resolution well, though a couple of screens were pushing the boundaries a bit.
- Microsoft Windows support: Post2Blog installed relatively quickly and did not crash during the testing.
- Portability: I copied the software over to another computer from the installation directory and it did run. It had, however, lost the settings entered into it. I suspect that with a little research it might be possible to make this thing work properly from a USB flash memory drive.
This no-nonsense tool worked very smoothly up to the point of posting articles on the server. Unfortunately, because it generated errors on every post I attempted to submit, I was concerned about a possible loss of data or other problems. I was also disappointed because of the lack of tag and keyword support. I’ll come back and look at this again if I can’t find something better, because it gets very close to what I’m looking for and it’s supposedly free (in spite of the nag screens I saw).
Qumana Blogging Client 3.0.1 for Windows
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on February 6th, 2009
In our ongoing series of blogging client reviews for Windows and Movable Type, we turn to the Qumana Blog Editor from Qumana Software. This review is based on the trial version downloadable from the vendor’s site as of 2/3/2009.
Upon initial launch, the Qumana Blog Editor (QBE hereafter) installer indicated that Java 1.4 or later was necessary for the product to work properly. I took a trip over to Sun’s site and downloaded the latest java runtime and installed that. Installation of QBE required about 5 clicks, after which the configuration process began.
First, it asked for the blog’s URL:
Then, it wanted to know the type of blog it was (though it had pre-selected the correct one), and what its “endpoint” was. I’ve never heard that term used before, and it took a couple of tries to give it the correct URL (which was the path to mt-xmlrpc.cgi on the server). Then, I was asked to supply login info:
It then connected to my server and downloaded information about my blogs. (The two blurred-out ones are defunct and I didn’t want to accidentally generate traffic to them by making them visible here.)
I selected the blogs I wanted to work with and clicked Finish. It downloaded information about them automatically.
One QBE is installed and configured, it brings you to the main screen, where you can select a blog, view the existing posts, see a preview of them, add new posts, and new blogs:
When you click the “New Post” button, you’re brought to the editor window. Here you can enter an article’s title, type its main text, select the categories it belongs to, insert tags, HTML, advertising, change the creation date, modify text formatting, insert images and links, and of course publish your posts. All the formatting tools I need and use were there.
The editor window and main window both fit comfortably on an 800×600 screen, making the product suitable for use with netbook PCs.
In the Source View you can work directly with the HTML code of the post. The HTML displayed by the software is in “plain text” format. There is no syntax highlighting, no automatic indentation, or any other advanced editing features. This is acceptable for an old HTML coder like me, but may not be robust enough for others.
After you’ve finished your article, clicking “Publish Post” transmits it to the server. While it’s being published, a graphic appears on-screen:
In the case of my first test post, I received an error:
However, when I looked on the site itself, I could see that the post had been submitted and scheduled for a future date as intended. This meant I’d be able to use QBE to post articles I didn’t want to see in my blog until much later. A second attempted post didn’t fare as well. I received the same error and the post did not make it to the server that time. A third attempt had the same fate.
I also noticed that my post date reading “Now” was actually several hours off. Turns out that QBE defaults to Greenwich Mean Time rather than Eastern Standard Time. Changing that corrected the problem.
To add an image to a blog post, you first click the “Insert Image” button on the editor window. You will be prompted by QBE to select a wrapping style for the text near the image, with the option of choosing advanced settings.
Advanced settings include alternate text, an image title, specific height and width, border, spacing, class, and style.
When you’ve finished specifying how the image should look, clicking “Upload & Insert” will upload the image to your Movable Type site and insert it into the post you’re working on.
The software’s spell checker seems to work fine. It quickly pounced on the intentional typos I placed in my test post and suggested correct words for the misspelled ones.
How did Qumana Blog Editor 3.0.1 stand up against my list of desired features? Let’s see…
- Both WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing of entries: QBE 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. Still it’s good enough for me.
- Ability to create and store blog entries when offline: The software has this capability, which is a good thing since I was only able to get one of three test posts to make it to the server.
- Spell Checking: This feature worked well for me in my testing and had all the options I think I would need from it.
- Post-dating of blog entries: I was able to create and submit posts with QBE to be seen online at a later date and time, as I wanted to be able to do.
- Access to multiple blogs: QBE handled my multiple blogs just fine.
- Access to all my article categories: QBE was able to automatically bring down all the categories from my various blogs and make them available to me within the editor.
- Support for keywords, excerpts, and tags fields: QBE supports tags, but not the Movable Type excerpts and keywords fields. This was disappointing but not a deal-breaker.
- Automated image and file uploads: This feature appeared to work flawlessy, submitting my pictures to the server and inserting them into the post as I requested.
- Netbook screen support: QBE handled an 800×600 resolution well, with no loss of functionality.
- Microsoft Windows support: QBE installed relatively quickly and did not crash during the testing.
- Portability: This option wasn’t tested. Since it’s a Java based application, it’s probably more portable than most.
This was definitely one of the better blog clients I’ve tested so far. It met nearly all of my desired criteria and seemed to run just fine. Unfortunately, it did lose two posts and generated errors on all three test posts I created. This didn’t inspire me with a lot of confidence. I may come back and look at it again later.
Anconia RocketPost 2 Blog Client Review
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on February 5th, 2009
Anconia RocketPost 2 is a Windows blogging client compatible with Movable Type. I downloaded a free trial from the manufacturer’s web site to evaluate it with respect to my criteria published earlier.
Installation of RocketPost 2 was straightforward and easy. It took a double-click to launch the installer and 3 clicks to complete the installation of the trial version, which will expire in 7 days after installation.
Configuration was not quite as simple as installation. After installation, a setup wizard prompts you for several pieces of information. You’re asked if you already have a blog online:
Next, you’re asked the address of that blog:
Then, the username and password used to post to that blog:
A short description of the blog:
The name of the blog:
At which point you’re dropped into the main screen of the program:
At first glance, this all looks good and looks like it’s worked, but it hasn’t. Right-clicking on the blog name and choosing “Set Up Blogs” brought me to this window:
Clicking “Modify” gave me the chance to actually make some settings changes:
For some reason, RocketPost decided my Movable Type blog was a BlogEngine.NET blog. To get my blog to work, I had to change the “Type”, “Server”, “Server folder”, “Secure (SSL)”, and “Port” settings. Once I had done that, I was able to click the “Get Blog Names” button and see that it had retrieved the list of blogs from my server. It appeared I was now ready to make my first post.
Creating a new blog post is pretty straightforward. You click the “New Post” button on the main window and an editor window is displayed:
From here, you can enter the title and text of the post. You can change fonts, font sizes, make text bold/underline/italic/strikethrough, modify colors, indent it, outdent it, left/right/center justify, add/remove hyperlinks, break pages, insert horizontal rules, insert tables, create drop caps, and create pull quotes. That’s pretty much everything I can imagine wanting to do, and more, within the editor. It’s certainly more than I can do right now.
To add a hyperlink, you select the text you want to link in the editor, then click the hyperlink button. A window of link options is displayed:
The way RocketPost handles tags is nice. Once you’ve used a tag, RocketPost keeps track of it and offers it to you again on future posts with a drop-down menu with checkboxes:
RocketPost also downloaded and offered all the relevant post categories from my blog in the editor:
RocketPost also provides the ability to edit the raw HTML of a post, with the HTML tags highlighted for easy location:
In fact, aside from maybe a more formatted HTML editor (tag indenting, more colors, etc.), I can’t think of any editor functionality I would would want from a blogging client that isn’t present in RocketPost.
Images can be added to posts fairly easily. After clicking on the “Insert Image” button, you’re asked to choose an image on your computer:
Next, you’re asked if you want to resize the image, align it, adjust its compression quality, add a caption, and a few other options:
If you click “Done” at this point, the image isn’t inserted in the post or uploaded to the server, and you’ve just lost all the work you’ve done up to this point. The correct move is to click “Insert” to insert the image into the post.
When you publish the post on the server, the image will be automatically uploaded with it. This worked fine for the tests I did.
I was pretty impressed with the spell checking feature of this software compared to others I’ve looked at. It displays alternate spellings for misspelled words, allowing you to choose them by simply hitting a number key. You can also add the word to the dictionary, ignore the misspelling, or even look the word up on the web if you want. It’s also really fast. I was quite impressed with what I saw of it in my brief testing.
Once the post is complete, you can offer to schedule it for a future date by clicking the “Status” drop down and selecting “Publish in Future”. When I did this and selected a future date/time, I expected it would upload the article to the server and use the Movable Type “Scheduled” post feature to make the post “wait” until the specified time. I was wrong. When I tried to submit the post to the server, I received this dialog:
That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I certainly didn’t plan for my blogging client to be up 24×7 in case there is a post it’s supposed to transmit. For my criteria, that’s a big strike against this product. I can understand that there are probably some blogging systems out there without a “scheduled post” feature for whom this option is fine, but mine isn’t one of them. In spite of the show-stopper, I wanted to see if it could actually submit an article with images to the server.
After finishing a test post and clicking the “Post” button, the software “thought” for a little while before coming back with this error:
When I looked on the server, the post (and the image) had gone up as I had created them, so the post did in fact work in spite of the error. I created another test post. That one went up
without error, so it may have been a transient network issue.
Below are the criteria I established for the ideal blogging client for my needs, and a brief discussion of how well Anconia RocketPost 2 compared to those requirements.
- Both WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing of entries: RocketPost does allow for both WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing. WYSIWYG editing offers many of the formatting options I use, except for indented paragraphs. HTML editing highlights tags in the HTML, making them easier to separate from the text between them.
- Ability to create and store blog entries when offline: The software did have the ability to create and store posts while offline and this feature seemed to work.
- Spell Checking: Spell checking worked well, quickly, and was a little more robust than on some blogging clients I’ve seen. It would even look potential misspellings up on the web.
- Post-dating of blog entries: Although RocketPost does support publishing blog entries in the future, it does this through a rather lame implementation. Instead of using the Movable Type “Scheduled” post feature, it actually brings up a dialog box that says “To publish this post in the future, click Cancel and leave RocketPost running until the publish date and time. Publish the post immediately instead?” I have no intention of leaving the client up and running 24×7 so it can post delayed entries that my content management system can do for me. This was a definite deal-breaker for this software.
- Access to multiple blogs: Although the software correctly recognized that I had several blogs on the same server, it required me to set each of them up individually. While this is a minor inconvenience, I’ve seen other blogging tools that handle this with ease.
- Access to all my article categories: RocketPost did import the categories automatically and allowed me to access them.
- Support for keywords, excerpts, and tags fields: Keywords and excerpt were not available. Tags were available, and frequently used sets of tags could be defined, stored, and used as needed in the future. This was a nice feature that I could imagine using.
- Automated image and file uploads: The product handled this smoothly and easily.
- Netbook screen support: The client’s windows fit comfortably in an 800×600 screen, making them suitable for netbook use.
- Microsoft Windows support: The client ran fine on the Windows XP SP3 machine on which I tested it, except for the odd behavior noted in the installation section.
- Portability: The program is not designed for portability. I tried a simple experiment, copying its “C:\Program Files” directory to another machine where it had not been installed. It was unable to run from there due to missing DLLs. While this might have been resolved with a bit more work, I had completed my review already and decided against this particular software.
On balance, this is one of the better blogging clients I’ve examined in my testing to date. It met most of my criteria well and exceeded my expectations of a couple. Unfortunately, the inability to use Movable Type’s scheduled posts feature was a deal-breaker for me and I removed the trial from my system.
I did discover one oddity that carried over to other machines I tested on. If I was browsing in Microsoft Internet Explorer and attempted to download a file, I’d get the usual “To help protect your security, Internet Explorer blocked this site from downloading files…” message, whereupon I was immediately and unexpectedly greeted with the RocketPost trial warning.
Apparently, anything that triggered Internet Explorer to display a dialog or a yellow warning message would also trigger RocketPost to launch automatically. It would immediately start a new post with the URL of the file I was trying to download as the title and the text of the post. Maybe this is a feature to help you blog about your experiences on the web, but it struck me as a bug…. and a pretty ugly one.
That’s especially true when you consider that I was unable to download the file because any attempts to click the yellow Internet Explorer bar and download the file just launched another instance of RocketPost. (Your mileage may vary, but mine didn’t. For the record, the virtual machine used for testing was a clean install from a good Windows XP CD with very little other software on it.) This alone was enough to convince me not to use RocketPost.
Semagic 1.7.3.3 Blog Client for Windows
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on February 3rd, 2009
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.
Looking at WB Editor 3
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on February 2nd, 2009
This will be the first in a series of articles on this site looking at various blog client packages for Windows which are compatible with Movable Type. It’s based on our initial article discussing my requirements for a Windows-based blog client. In this article, we’ll look at the commercial client called “WB Editor 3“.
Installation
The client is downloaded from the vendor’s web site as an EXE file. This file checks for the prerequisites needed to run WB Editor 3 on your PC. On my test PC, a virtual machine running Windows XP Pro, the installer placed Microsoft SQL Server 2005 on the system before going on to install itself. The installation was simple enough and required only a few mouse clicks to complete, upon which the software launched automatically.
Configuration
Once the installation had been completed, the software prompted me for the URL of my blog, the “service URL” for the blog, my user name, and the service password (which for Movable Type is different from my login password). It took under a minute for the software to communicate with my web server, pull down the information about my multiple blogs hosted there, capture images of what the site looks like, etc. When finished, it displayed a screen showing the 7 sites I have running on my server, along with information about recent posts.
Creating a Post
When you’re ready to post something to your blog, you click the “Create New Post” button on the screen. This displays an editor window similar to the following:
In the first red box you enter the title you wish to use for the post. In the second you edit the content in a WYSIWYG format. The editor allows for changes in font, font size, bold, italic, underline, strike through, superscript, subscript, left alignment, center alignment, right alignment, numbered lists, bulleted lists, indentation, changes in text color, changes in background color, and hyper linking.
During configuration, it imports the categories used for your blog(s) and allows you to select the desired categories with a simple check box.
The time stamp for an article may be adjusted as desired. The article can be set to a published or draft status.
Under the tools section, you can do a spell check, edit the HTML source of the post, insert information about the music you might be playing at the time, insert an image or file, or perform find-and-replace operations.
Image Uploading
Uploading an image to your blog, especially a Movable Type blog, is a fairly simple affair. First, you bring up the tools pane:
Then you click the “Insert image or file” option, which will bring up the image insertion and uploading dialog:
After the image has been uploaded, it will be displayed on the editor page where it may be resized, centered, etc.
Spell Checking
I found it interesting that when I spell checked a partial draft of this article in WB Editor 3 that its spell checker stopped first on the word “blog”. It apparently couldn’t recognize the word and wanted me to use “bldg” (the abbreviation for “building”) instead. Strange that a blogging tool doesn’t recognize the word “blog” but easily corrected by adding it to the dictionary.
Apart from that, the spell checking tool was fast, easy to use, and did the job.
Posting Articles to the Blog
It didn’t take long to master the basic use of WB Editor 3, which is a credit to its designers’ and programmers’ work. I used it to post a sample article to one of my blogs to see how it worked. It took the software a while to make the post, after which it generated an error:
The article did, however, make it to the site. It took only a single mouse click and a few seconds of waiting to get the article posted.
Unfortunately, it exposed what appears to be a significant bug in the software. I set the time stamp for the article to 2/12/2009. When posted on the site, however, the article appeared immediately (instead of being a scheduled post) and with today’s date rather than the date I selected.
Conclusion
So, how did WB Editor 3 stack up to my list of requirements for a blog client:
- Both WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing of entries: The WYSIWYG editor responded well from a performance viewpoint, contained the layout features I typically use, and didn’t exhibit any problems. HTML editing is handled through a separate window that highlights the HTML syntax, making editing much simpler than many tools I’ve used.
- Ability to create and store blog entries when offline: WB Editor 3 does offer the option to store blog entries offline and publish them later. It wasn’t obvious at first where the draft went after I saved it, however. I spent a few minutes clicking around to find it again. When I finally did re-open the draft, WB Editor 3 no longer knew which site I had written it for, what category I’d selected for the article, or the time stamp I’d provided.
- Spell checking: As discussed earlier, this option exists and works well.
- Post-dating of blog entries: While the option is there to set the time stamp of a blog entry, my experience after submitting a few test articles is that the time stamp entered by the user must be getting ignored by the software. An entry set to appear 11 days later was published immediately instead of being stored as a scheduled post. That’s a deal-breaker for me. Another article I’d instructed it to save as a draft (meaning “don’t publish this yet”) also went up as a published item, with the time stamp again ignored.
- Access to multiple blogs: This feature is present in the software, is relatively intuitive to work with, and appears to work as designed.
- Access to all my article categories: This feature works well and is easy to use.
- Support for keywords, excerpts, and tags: Unless I missed something, this feature does not exist in the software. While not a deal-breaker it’s definitely a big disappointment.
- Automated image and file uploads: This feature worked well and was in some ways more intuitive than other tools I’ve worked with. It was able to transparently and easily upload the images in this article to the server directly from the Windows clipboard.
- Netbook screen support: Based on my Asus Eee PC 1000H’s screen resolution of 1024×600, this tool would work just fine. I tested it even at 800×600 resolution and was able to access all functionality.
- Microsoft Windows support: The tool runs fine under Windows, generally responds quickly, and didn’t crash in my testing.
- Portability: Given the tool’s use of SQL Server and other Windows technologies, it’s not easily portable on a USB memory stick or other device. While not a deal-breaker for me, it was a significant disappointment.
On balance, I thought this was actually quite a good blogging client for Windows. It met most of my criteria well, but unfortunately didn’t meet some of the criteria I considered vital or important. That makes it unsuitable for me personally, but possibly just what you may be looking for if your needs differ from mine.
I will be continuing to look at other blogging clients to see if I can identify one that is a better fit for my needs and preferences. Watch this site for more news.
Blogging Clients for Windows and Movable Type
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on February 1st, 2009
This site (and my others) runs on the open source Movable Type blogging system. [Editor's note: After working on later articles in this series, I decided to move my sites from Movable Type to WordPress, as it worked much better with the available blogging clients.] The interface for submitting articles to Movable Type is relatively simple and straightforward, but it’s not as convenient as I would like it to be. It’s also not available to me when I’m not online, which means it’s not possible to create blog entries when I’m away from an Internet connection. For that reason, I began investigating blogging clients for Windows. My criteria for identifying a suitable client included the following:
- Both WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing of entries: There are times I want to adjust a blog entry to look a particular way, include a different type of content, etc. Having access to both a visual editor and a raw HTML editor is therefore a critical component for me.
- Ability to create and store blog entries when offline: Although I have a tool I developed myself for storing blog entries offline for later importation to the site, I’d prefer to use a single tool that handles entering the entries and (when a connection is available) uploading them to the server.
- Spell Checking: Although I’m a pretty competent speller, I’m sometimes a bit dyslexic when it comes to typing. I’d like my blogging client to provide a double-check to help me catch typos as well as legitimate misspellings.
- Post-dating of blog entries: There are times when I write a blog entry in advance of the time I plan to publish it for the world to see. For that reason, I need the client to be able to handle the Movable Type option of scheduling a post for a future date and time.
- Access to multiple blogs: My single Movable Type instance supports all of my blogs. I’d like my client to provide access to all of the blogs as well, with the ability to post to any of them. Ideally, I’d like the tool to import information about all the blogs automatically without my having to configure each individual one.
- Access to all my article categories: Some of my sites only have a small number of categories. Others have a long list of categories. I want to be able to easily publish an article into one or more of the existing categories without having to remember precisely what categories a specific blog includes.
- Support for keywords, excerpts, and tags fields: I try to make use of these Movable Type fields to make it easier for search engines and other tools to properly categorize and index my posts, so that it’s easier for a reader to find something of interest. I need a tool that supports these fields.
- Automated image and file uploads: Some of my blogs don’t tend to use a lot of images or file uploads. Others would benefit from an easier-to-use interface for including images and uploads than the native Movable Type system. I’d like a blogging client that makes it easy to include images, YouTube videos, and other types of content without having to resort to cutting and pasting raw HTML into the entry.
- Netbook screen support: I use a Windows netbook to do a fair amount of my blogging, so I’d like the client to fit comfortably in my netbook’s screen. That means, at a minimum, a window design that fits in a netbook’s display, or (better) a window size that can be adjusted to fit any (reasonable) screen size.
- Microsoft Windows support: While I do run Linux and OS X at times, I’m primarily a Windows user. Therefore, I need a client that runs on Windows (specifically XP and Vista). If it also runs on Linux and/or OS that’s a plus, but it’s not a requirement.
- Portability: There are times when the computer I’m using isn’t mine, such as when I’m at a conference, an off-site class, or a convention. If I don’t have my netbook with me, I’d like the client to be able to execute from a USB flash drive so that I can carry it around with me and use it without having to install it on a system.
With those criteria in mind, I set out to research what blogging clients are available which might meet the criteria. Here’s what I found, both in the freeware and commercial sectors:
- Microsoft Windows Live Writer
- Coding Robots BlogJet
- SharpMT
- w.bloggar
- ScribeFire
- Zempt
- WinJournal
- Zoundry Raven
- Blogcaster
- Portablog
- PowerBlog - As reported here, this client has been discontinued
- BlogDesk
- Chrysanth Webstory
- Deepest Sender
- Elicit
- Post2Blog - Reviewed by BlogInspiration here
- Qumana Blog Editor - Reviewed by BlogInspiration here
- RocketPost 2 - Reviewed by BlogInspiration here
- Semagic - Reviewed by BlogInspiration here
- WB Editor 3 - Reviewed by BlogInspiration here
As you can see, there are lots of potential blogging clients out there which might match up to the criteria set forth at the start of this article. I plan to examine the above tools in the coming weeks to see if I can identify one that best fits the criteria and works intuitively for me.
How to Pick a Money-making Blog Idea
Posted by: admin in Blogging Resources on December 22nd, 2008
The “doughroller.net” blog carried an interesting article back in November that I just stumbled across. It talks about how to start a money-making blog by picking a good topic area, monetizing it, doing keyword research, and related homework. If you’re interested in starting a money-making blog, or you want to see how you might improve the money-making aspect of an existing blog, it may be of value to you. Here’s the link.