Posted: December 23rd, 2006 in General »
As much as I love WordPress, I loathe the admin interface for creating new blog posts. I don’t particularly enjoy using any on-line services to update my blogs after too many years of losing posts by accidentally hitting the back button or due to a dropped net connection when you finally hit that publish button.
Up until now my solution has been w.bloggar, a small application that works great for writing at any time, net connection or not, & saving posts for further editing. I usually post ‘em up right away, but it is nice to have the option to save the post as a draft when the phone rings or another distraction pops up. I particularly like being able to post to multiple blogs at the same time. If you have a Blogger account with several blogs, an easy check mark beside the blogs you’d like to update makes posting to multiple sites easy peasy.
There are a couple of extra steps when it comes to posting the same content to multiple blog platforms & while relatively painless, I’d still like to cut out these steps to improve my work flow. My main blog is hosted on Blogger, but since I used a Live Journal for several years, I have some friends who want to see my updates via their friends lists. So I compose my posts in w.bloggar, CTRL + C to copy & then post to Live Journal. Next I switch my w.bloggar to my Blogger account by hitting File > Select Account. Hit CTRL + V to paste the body of my blog post, re-type the post title & hit publish to send the same post over to Blogger.
Not much to complain about, but re-typing the title & the annoying habit of randomly pasting the blog post including all the font tags are the ass pains I’d prefer to avoid entirely. I periodically get errors when trying to post to Blogger too, which never seems to happen at LJ.
So my search for the perfect blogging platform continues!
Features I’m prowling for:
The last one is the key functionality I’m craving & seems to be the toughest to find. How often are you searching the web & see something that sparks a great blog post? But to right click > Save As a picture, open your FTP client & browse through the directories (both local & on your host) & then upload the image, take note of its location & THEN open your blogging client to get the post rolling…I’ve already passed on the idea & went for another cuppa coffee instead.
Ideally I could right click & upload to my designated image host. There are some nifty extensions for Firefox that do this, but they seem to be tied to specific image hosters (like Flickr or ImageShack). That’s great for folks who rely on those exclusively, but I’ve never been one to trust other hosting services & can’t imagine what a nightmare it would be to edit all of your old blog posts should a site like ImageShack ever shut down.
I’d like the option to send my personal images to Flickr, my business images to a pictures folder on www.webmasterchick.com & pictures for other blogs to anywhere else I designate without being forced to use 1 single account.
I’m still testing it out, but I may have found a great solution. Stay tuned for more as the Battle of the Blog Editors continues!
No comments
comments rss | trackback uri