Feb 02, 2003
Bitching about weblog tools.
Bitching about weblog tools.
I was bitching about the sorry state of desktop weblogging tools. Sergio suggested using blog tools that integrate with Mozilla. I have Mozilla installed and even use it sometimes but the fast upgrade cycle makes me weary of installing additional tools because (I think) you have to re-install them all after upgrading to a newer build (at least that’s what happened to my Google toolbar when I updated Mozill once). Recently I found w.bloggar and decided to give it a try. It’s already at version 3.0 but overall I’m dissapointed. It looks nice but the user model chosen is alien to me. It looks like design of the app was driven by the available XML-RPC APIs and not by how users might view the task. For example there is a way to get a list of N recent posts. When you get the list you can select one of the posts for editing but when you do it you loose the list. You have to re-do the operation to get another post. I’m pretty sure there’s API that says “get me N last posts” so the developer just added button for that function. But the way I see this, there are posts that I’ve already posted on the server and drafts of posts that I keep locally so that I can work on them until I decide they’re ready to go. I should have lists of both kinds of posts available all the time in the UI. Beside the general GUI strangeness there are annoying things like the fact that once you choose a category, there’s no way to go back to blank category. This bug shouldn’t survive until v3.00. It’s nice that it have spell-checking, but I would much prefer the kind that highlites mis-spelled words directly in the text instead of more traditional approach of “run the spell checkin process on the text).
What I need from my desktop blogging tool is simple: a reasonable way to write my posts and publish them. But I want to be able to keep drafts locally until I decide I’m happy with them. W.bloggar almost forces me to publish current post until I can work on another one. Howard had similar experience.