For a few days, I've been testing different blog editors and trying to find which one I would prefer to use. My requirements are simple at the moment:
- Being able to publish to a blog platform I use at the moment. That's being Blogger (with a New Blogger [Google] API)
- Being able to publish in draft first. I don't mind to "touch" an entry before publishing, and doing so from Blogger's own web-based editor helps to "preview" the entry how will it really look like.
- Adding tags to the post. Labels, categories, tags - I don't care how would you call this, I want it working if my platform supports them (and it does).
- as a subset, pinging to Technorati and/or other services and including their links in the posts is welcome albeit unnecessary requirement.
- as a subset, pinging to Technorati and/or other services and including their links in the posts is welcome albeit unnecessary requirement.
- Convenient linking to other things. For example, suggesting to use what I have at the moment in the clipboard cache is convenient, as it allows me to copy something in the browser, and then directly paste it in the editor. I would also welcome convenient linking to my own posts.
- Local storing of the drafts. This is invaluable. I write something, I don't trust the program - I want to save it as either text, html or xml files (or combination of these).
- Nice pleasant GUI is very needed. After all, I can use a notepad (gedit, vi, emacs - choose your own), but I don't. I like to work with nice and simple interfaces.
I've written 2 articles, in which I told that Linux Editors sucks (and that was my personal feeling after I tried more than 5 different editors and found all of them either not working or sucking big time on features), and also that I've decided to try running a Windows blog editors (yes!) using WINE and I have written another post on that.
So, I've found couple of editors that I succeeded to run in Linux. Here, I will talk about the first one, BlogJet. First, here's the screenshot of using this editor (click on the image to see in full size; I'm using Black Vista theme):
Writing is very easy. Just start typing - and that's it. All the regular features work (Italic, Bold and Underscore) work as anticipated. The editor setting were very simple - it recognized my blogging platform and correctly fetched my previous blog posts.
Font usage is configurable and the default is very pleasant to my eyes.
More cool features: easy switch between WYSIWYG and HTML modes, easy setup for pinging services after posting, easy publishing (with one button), and word counting (I like this one a lot!!!), and boy its final HTML code is so nice and clean !!!But now to the bad stuff:
- Tagging (labels, categories, whatever) - it doesn't work with Blogger at the moment. Yes, it is known misfeature, but I find it weird that only one type of platform is supported for the moment (that would be Wordpress if I'm not mistaken).
- Draft posting is not supported with Blogger. Sigh…
- Although I can get my recent posts list, I don't have convenient option of linking to them. Say, I'd select something, right-click on it and choose "Link to previous post…" and then get a list and select the post I want to link to. That would be great.
- Right-click context menu is weird - it seems like it was not implemented at all and all I see it system-wide menu. Not good.
Considering that a full version is a commercial software and it doesn't support many of the features I would like to have, I'd say I would not buy this product at the moment.
My rating (with 10 as best score):- GUI and ease of use: 10
- Feature set (for my needs): 5
- Convenience (for my needs): 7
Total score (in my subjective opinion):
- for my needs (blogger): 6.5
- for Wordpress users: 8.5
So, would I use it? Maybe, I haven't decided yet.
In next post I will review running Zoundry blog editor on Linux.
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