Posts Tagged ‘post2blog’
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).