Ubuntu Musings

One piece of software that Linux is missing, in my opinion, is an exceptional blog editor. There are a number of these applications available – like Drivel and BloGTK — but none of them are exceptional. They do a good job but they’re lacking when compared to applications like MarsEdit or Windows Live Writer.

Working offline

OK, you might be wondering why someone would want a desktop blogging client when they could just write their posts in the Web-based editor of the blogging tool that they use. Not everyone is always online. Some bloggers, myself included, prefer to write several posts in advance offline. That’s where a good blog editor comes in handy.

Right now, I edit my posts in gedit and convert them to HTML using Markdown. When I have a number of posts ready, I copy them to WordPress and publish the lot. It’s a lot more efficient than it sounds.

Over the last little while, I’ve been toying with a few other blogging tools on the Linux desktop. Here’s a sampling.

Playing with Sun Weblog Publisher

Lately, though, I’ve been working with Sun Weblog Publisher. I first tried it a year or so ago, and it did a fairly good job of converting OpenOffice.org Writer into a blog editor. Then, it started acting flakey and I dumped it. A couple of weeks ago, though, downloaded and installed an update and the flakiness was gone.

While it does a good job, Sun Weblog Publisher still doesn’t give me all the flexibility that I want. It does upload images that you put into a post in Writer, but for some reason the spacing between paragraphs disappears. Maybe it’s something that I’ve done wrong while writing the posts; have to look into that.

ScribeFire

Like many people, I’m finding myself doing more and more work within a Web browser — mainly Mozilla Firefox. I have a fistfull of extensions installed, including ScribeFire. As you’ve guessed, this is an extension that adds a nice little blog editor to Firefox.

It’s easy to use: just configure it to post to your blog (here’s a list of supported platforms and services), type your post, and fire away. When configured, ScribeFire enables you to select any of the categories that you have defined for your posts, and add tags. You can also upload images, save posts as drafts (for later editing), and set the timestamp for publishing your posts.

The formatting that ScribeFire supports is pretty basic, and I can’t find a way (beyond editing the HTML) of inserting a WordPress read the rest of this entry link.

Flock

I’ve written about Flock elsewhere. And I’ll repeat (more or less) what I said about its built-in blog editor: it’s like a simple word processor. You can write posts and add formatting, links, and images. The editor works with Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress.com, and Xanga. However, if you a blogging engine — like WordPress or Movable Type — installed on your Web site then you can configure Flock’s blog editor to work (more or less) with that.

Overall, the Flock blog editor is fairly bare bones, especially when you compare it to high-powered desktop blog editors like MarsEdit or BlogJet. But it gets the job done quickly and easily.

Wrapping up

While I like a number of the blog editors that I’ve mentioned, none of them really does everything that I want. ScribeFire comes close, and I’m looking forward to BloGTK 2.0. Until then, I’ll probably stick with using gedit and Markdown. I might use ScribeFire a bit more for live blogging at conferences and the like, though.

What do you use to blog? Feel free to leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. Desktop blogging clients for Linux
2. Eee PC: the perfect computer for a conference?
3. Writing with Markdown

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.