Blog Publishing Editor

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For my very first review I will be reviewing Blog Publishing Editors. I cam across Windows Live Writer a couple of weeks ago and thought that publishing posts to you blog from your desktop was a great idea, it saves you from having to log on to the website and you get some additional interesting features, in other words it makes things easy. I liked Windows Live Writer, however I wanted to test others and see what features they include, and here is what I found out. My criteria for trying the software was that it has to:

1. Be free, as good as it is I'm not paying for something like this.
2. Work with Blogger, because that is where my blog is.
3. Work on Windows, because that is what I use.

So here we go, below are the three Blog Publishing Editors I chose to review.

Qumana

- Download

To download the installer you are asked to enter an email address. I naively thought that I will be getting an email with a download link or something along those lines, so I entered my email address. It turned out that the download starts right after you hit the 'Download' button, so now I hope my inbox won't be getting spammed.

- Installation

Installing Qumana was a breeze, it is very easy, took only about 4 clicks and the installation ran fast.

- Configuration

Configuring your blog is done through a wizard. In this wizard you need to enter the URL of your blog, the username and password and choose the blog you want to add. Nothing too complex, even my mother could probably make it work. 

- Features

The first thing I liked about Qumana is the Blog Manager. From here you can see all your blogs on the left hand side and when you click on each one the posts for that blog are displayed. When you click on each post it is then displayed in the bottom. This is pretty useful when managing multiple blogs.

qumana_manager 

What I would have liked to be able to do is edit the post when you select it. There is plenty of white space in the UI so it can be easily added without making everything look cluttered. To edit a post you need to double click on it and it will open in the editor. One advantage of this is that you may open more than one post in multiple windows.

qumana_editor

The editor itself is also easy to use with the toolbars on top and the fancy buttons give it an attractive look. From me it gets credit for that. It's true that you would rather have something that is useful rather than look good, but I choose both, I like things to be functional as well as pleasing to the eye. In the editor you have two views, WYSIWYG and Source View. I found the Source View to be a little disappointing. Basically it's just a block of text which also includes the HTML tags. I would have liked to see something more structured, since as it is it would be a nuisance to find anything. The WYSIWYG editor on the other hand is decent, with an option to enable inline spell check.

Other features includes a *very* simple search in the Blog Manager, where you can enter a string of text and it will display all posts that contain the same text. You are also able to save your posts to your hard drive in HTML format. A little feature that I liked is that you can keep it minimized in your tray, which makes it very easy for you to open the Blog Manager or start a new post.

- Miscellaneous

The thing that disappointed me the most in Qumana is that the categories do not seem to work, at least for Blogger. This is the main reason that I would not use it, I need all my posts to have a category, and if I have to do it through the website each time I make a new post I might as well not use a Blog Publishing editor in the first place. Another factor would be that you do not have the option to upload pics that you use in your post directly to your weblog. I find this to be inconvenient, I don't want to have to keep uploading pics prior to adding them to my post. Something that would be nice to have is the option to add videos from the WYSIWYG editor, just the way you can add pictures.

- Rating
3s

 

Windows Live Writer

- Download

You do not need to enter any info to download the installer. When you open http://writer.live.com you will see two big orange buttons that say Get It Free. Click on one of them and the download starts.

- Installation

During the installation you are asked if you want to install other Live software like Messenger etc. I find this a little annoying when installing software, because I just want to get the software I want installed, I don't want to know about your other software at this point. The installation also took a couple of minutes to complete, in fact I left it running and carried on doing something else while it was installing.

- Configuration

Adding your blog to Windows Live Writer is very easy, you need to enter the URL, username and password in one dialog and you're done. Lately I have been preferring this method much more than wizards, because while wizards are great, having one dialog where I enter everything required without having to keep click 'Next' is much faster.

- Features

The amount of features Windows Live Write includes are quite impressive. First off you have three different views to choose from, the Normal WYSIWYG editor, Web Layout, HTML Code and the Web Preview. I especially like the Web Preview which lets you preview your post in the context of your blog before publishing it. For someone like me that wants everything to look perfect, this is a great feature. You also have the option to use a single window, or else multiple windows for each post you open. I personally like to to keep everything in one window.

livewriter 

When creating/editing a post the categories are displayed at the bottom, with the ability to easily add new categories. This is one of the important features for me, as I want every post to have a category. Another feature that is, in my opinion, very important is that you can upload images directly to your blog. Additionally you also have the option to configure your FTP server so images are uploaded there automatically.

I also like how saving drafts works in Windows Live Write. You can save drafts locally which then you can easily manage. Drafts are displayed in the menu on the left hand side of the UI, where clicking on a draft will open it for editing and clicking on the 'x' beside it will delete it. Apart from that you can also turn on the option to automatically save drafts every N amount of minutes.

You can also find other plug-ins for Windows Live Write, so if there is a feature that you would like to see you might want to check the plug-ins page.

- Miscellaneous

If you manage multiple blogs in Windows Live Write, you have to select the blog you want to view from the menu on top. This means that you cannot list all your blogs in one window and you are only able to view and edit one blog at a time. In other words you can only edit one blog at a time, it is not possible to have more than one blog open in a single view. You can always have multiple instances of Windows Live Write for each blog you want to edit, however I would find it more practical to manage my blogs from a single instance.

- Rating
4s 

 

w.bloggar

- Download

When downloading the setup you have three options, the full version - Internet Explorer, the full version - Mozilla Firefox and a portable version - Internet Explorer. The portable version is meant for USB drives to allow you to blog from anywhere, where you can use a USB drive at least. I chose to download the full version - Mozilla Firefox. 

- Installation

The installation is both easy and fast with an option to install w.bloggar in five languages: English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

- Configuration

 Adding a blog is done through a wizard where you need to enter the blog type (Blogger, TypePad, etc...), an alias for the blog, your username and password. An interesting option included in the wizard is the ability to create a completely new blog, which will guide you in signing up with one of the thirteen providers supported and creating your blog.

- Features

I found the layout of w.bloggar to be quite limited. You have two views available, the Editor tab and the Preview tab. The fact that it does not have a WYSIWYG editor bothered me and its Editor displays the HTML tags when you format text, plus there is no option to enable inline spell check either.

wbloggar

Your list of blogs is displayed in a drop down list, and you just need to select the blog you want to publish your post to it. The main thing that I didn't like about w.bloggar is the way you manage posts. Viewing previous posts you made your blog is not really practical, in my case it didn't display the title for the posts, so search for the post you want would would pretty much be a nightmare. I don't know if this is an issue with Blogger or all blog types, but Blogger is one of the supported services so it should not have this problem.

With w.bloggar you can save your posts locally in a location that you choose, and it also has an import feature where you can import a text file to the w.bloggar editor. When adding an image you can upload it to your FTP from the application, which also works with other file types apart from images, however you are not able to upload images directly to your blog.

- Miscellaneous

I though it was quite strange that I was not able to add a title to my post. I still find it hard to accept that this is not possible, so I am not excluding the fact that I might have missed it. If there is a way to add a title though it definitely isn't straightforward. This was disappointing for me as I don't like the idea of having posts without a title.

- Rating
2s

 

Can you guess which one of these Blog Publishing Editors I'm posting from?

My aim was to write a review that covers the basic and main features of Blog Publishing Editors in a way that is both helpful and interesting so I hope that someone out there would find this review useful.

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