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.