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.