There are often times when you inspiration hits you like a bolt out of the blue, and you are either away from the t’internet – or need quicker access to your blog. There are a couple of desktop based solutions this that some bloggers may prefer and this post reviews 7 of the best free blog client alternatives to your traditionally blogging web application.
Windows Live Writer
URL: http://download.live.com/writer
Platform: Windows.
As with most software that comes out of Redmond – some people swear by it, and some absolutely detest it, however many faults it has Windows live writer is one of the more advanced editors for blogging on the desktop. It is also pretty extensible – with plugin support. In fact there has even been dedicated websites, catering for plugins. The installation process is relatively quick – but Microsoft do their best to bundle in other bits and pieces along with the download, so be smart and uncheck the other bits and pieces you dont need.
At time of writing, Live Writer supports a shed load of blogging platforms – including Windows Live, Sharepoint, Community Server, the Movable Type API, the Metaweblog API, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal and TypePad. Being a WordPress head, this was really the only option that I was interested in – however its good to see that they have thought about extensibility – provided through the option for the Metaweblog API.
Publishing material is a breeze, on setting up my WordPress blog, Live Writer automagically detected that I was using WordPress (probably via the meta generator tag) – and setup the system accordingly. Online drafts that you have within your blog, are unfortunately not available, but I guess that is to be expected. You can however choose to save a draft locally, or to your blog all from your desktop. All in all, a very well rounded piece of software that generates decent HTML, and supports a wide range of platforms.
Zoundry Raven
URL: http://www.zoundryraven.com/
Platform: Windows
Developed by the folks at Zoundry, Raven has received little updates toprogram features for quite some time. That however doesn’t mean the software isn’t a solid alternative to the wordpress editor. The good news is, that with a view to pushing the software forward, this is now an open source alternative as well, which gives the dev-heads amongst you the opportunity to develop it further.
Zoundry’s fundamental goal is to encourage the use of affiliates within its network, by enabling easier access to those affiliates for bloggers who wouldn’t already be familiar or comfortable in the setup of this themselves. The software makes it really easy for newbies who want to generate revenue from their site. You keep a high percentage of the referral yourself, and Zoundry pockets the remainder.
The software itself comes as a 9.3 mb download, and supports a wide variety of platforms including Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad, Drupal, Community server, Windows Live Spaces and WordPress out of the box. One nice touch was the addition of flash drive compatibility, so you can install a portable version of Raven to take with you on the road. You can also support multiple authors per machine, if you’ve a collection of family bloggers. Setup was a snap, I simply added my account, and my passwords, and Zoundry proceeded to download each post from the server. This took about 5 minutes over a broadband connection, but that was reasonable for the amount of posts that I have. Zoundry also parses out your posts, into actual content, links and images.
Blogging with Zoundry proved to be really easy, although the WordPress editor does a better job at determining the XHTML to output. Whilst Zoundry’s code was accurate and valid, it doesn’t include any of the wordpress default CSS styles – or import your CSS file from your site. This would be a really nice addition to the featureset, and is probably one advanced users would miss. Drafts are saved by default to your hard disk – and easily retrievable, although some bloggers may prefer this to have been saved on the server, or at least include an option to publish to drafts. This would mean you could carry on from where you left off blogging on your desktop from a different machine.
Overall Raven has a relatively rich feature set, and may suit those more comfortable with using desktop software than web based apps, or who find the admin panel of your blogging platform confusing.
Qumana
Platform: Windows / MacOs
Qumana is one of the few offline blog editors that is cross platform, however it did maintain the status quo in its configuration. Simply adding your blog URL (in my case for a WordPress blog) was enough to get going, as qumana auto-detected my blog settings.
Most notably, Qumana picked up my recent drafts -which some of the others mentioned didn’t do well. I was also impressed with the features of the actual posting – images can be easily aligned left right and center – which often is something that newbie’s struggle with getting right – due to the intricacies of HTML to a certain extent you have to know your float right from your clear left so to speak. Qumana takes some of this difficulty away.
Tagging of posts was also easy as pie. Another added bonus was the built in RPC pinging feature which allows you to ping the various blog services to alert them that you’ve added a post. Adding elements such as Youtube videos or multimedia can be performed from the HTML insert button, which gives you the opportunity to paste in embed code.
ScribeFire
URL: http://www.scribefire.com/
Platform: Mac / Windows
ScribeFire comes in the form of a Firefox plugin. The default behaviour of the plugin was to open at the bottom of the Firefox browser to give you access to your blog. I found this a bit tight for space initially when writing; but the settings can be changed to allow you to open the full scribefire interface in a new window.
This is probably a strength and a weakness; if you are looking to either live blog a live web stream, or break news based on a new website or service launch – scribefire has its benefits. You’ll be able to easily view both the blogging interface and the website in the same window and can watch both at the same time.
The options that scribefire gives bloggers is relatively minimal in comparison with some of the other desktop options out there, and I couldn’t really see any benefits to using it over the already web based WordPress editor. Scribe fire didn’t download any of my draft posts, or give me options for editing existings ones. Essentially it just gives a quick fire blogging tool right from the browser, as I’ve already mentioned it seems to be the main benefit of the system.
Blogdesk
URL: http://www.blogdesk.org/en/index.htm
Platform: Windows
Blog desk supports a variety of blogging platforms, including the popular WordPress, Movable Type, Expression Engine, Drupal and Dasblog amongst others. It is a Windows only application, and was a minimal 3.8MB of a download.
Blogdesk successfully imported all of my WordPress categories, and tested whether my server could support so-called “direct upload” which worked perfectly. The initial setup was relatively painless, and I got down to actually creating a test post.
If your blog happens to be coded with custom fields in use, blog desk is one of the few editors here that supports that. With many bloggers and webmasters using this powerful feature – this is a welcome addition as it may take some of the inital complexities away from guest bloggers who may not understand how a custom field works; and are more comfortable with a desktop application walk through. It also took into account snippets, and excerpts for displaying teasers on posts. Again – a feature which many of the aforementioned systems failed to implement.
Adding an image was also a joy – including support for the resize and position of your images, which is the level of functionality most bloggers expect from their web platform, but many offline editors pay little attention to – instead expecting tools like photoshop to fill that void. Blogdesk instead has taken this, implemented it and extend upon the existing functionality. This is great as you can add borders and shadows to your images giving them that extra bit of punch. Blogdesk also lets you browse posts which have already been published – including those in drafts – a great wee contender.
Post2Blog
URL: http://bit.ly/FrgIN
Platform: Windows
I’ve posted a direct link here to download.com – because frankly ByteScout (the developers of post2blog’s) website is rubbish, and took me around in circles before finding the download link. The program offers a variety of integration plug-ins for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Microsoft Word. Although I wasn’t able to get it to work with I.E due to a script error.
Post2blog’s distinguishing feature would have to be it’s spell check and thesarus integration. Whilst this is built into the wordpress editor, it is a feature that many of the offline editors miss. Having a thesarus available to you when creating new post can also make the difference when developing a killer headline. Post2Blog also offers integration with affliate schemes such as Amazon and Chikita Minimalls. Google Adsense options are also built into the editor for easy insertion.
It also offers a post to drafts feature which is refreshing to see. Personally I couldn’t do without my drafts feature in WordPress, and this program implements that functionality right on the desktop.
The editor itself comes with a variety of snazzy skins to make it fit right into your Windows setup, so for those of you who enjoy tinkering with GUI’s – this is a great addition, and the architecture is flexible enough to put your own design around the program.
Posting and saving blog posts was relatively straight forward from a user perspective, and as well as a draft option, posts could be saved on the local disk as a backup option. Some of the advanced options allowed you to specify a time to post (in advance) and specify whether comments, trackbacks and pings were turned on at the post level.
Flock
URL: http://www.flock.com
Platform: Windows / MacOs / Linux
Flock touts itself as a “social browser” – and it shares the same source code that Firefox is built on – the Mozilla engine. Some of the features of the browser itself are interesting with a wide range of social websites supported.
Whilst I haven’t fully explored the browser itself, the blogging engine built in out of the box is relatively minimal. There is no support for bringing down and editing old posts, only creating new ones. That said it is relatively unobtrusive inside the browser, and was simple and easy to setup.
Most of the major Blogging platforms are supported out of the box including, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal hosted and non-hosted WordPress. Although the self hosted You can have multiple blog accounts too
If you are creating alot of posts which require you to work alongside a browser window it would be a useful addition to your blogging arsenal.
linky
posted:August 23, 2009 4:12 am
Thanks man, that was really a useful review .
Abdu
linky
posted:December 30, 2009 1:57 pm
Lots of great free, open source, blogging clients for Linux and FreeBSD.
Chad McCullough