When I rebooted my blog here, one of my concerns was “how do I blog?” I use Wordpress, and I love Wordpress, but I also love using Safari and the two are not friends. You may have noticed some terribly mangled posts before, that was me even opening the editor in Safari with that post. This bug has been around a while, and it doesn’t seem to be going away - so that means I have to figure out another way to go.
That meant finding a client. I purchased ecto almost a year ago, but never really found myself liking it all that much - sufficiently that I’ll use it, but I’m always on the lookout for something else. When MarsEdit got an update recently, I tried it out as well - I liked it, but not $30 dollars liked it (not when I had ecto which wasn’t much different). It being a few months since I’ve searched for an alternative, I went out and looked around to see if anything new had came out. (If you’re a Mac user, i use this is invaluable)
Low and behold, Blogo had been born. Blogo (Shareware, $25) was something new for the Mac - it was a very simple, very clean blog writing client. Certainly, it’s UI was one of the nicest and most unique I’ve seen.
Blogo works with all the major blogging suites, and setting it up couldn’t be easier.
The problem, really, comes in with the fact it’s a bit too simple, at least for some. If you’re making simple text posts, with pictures and the occasional YouTube video I cannot recommend Blogo enough - there’s no reason to deal with the complexity of the other leading suites for such work. Blogo is truly a joy to work with, it’s smooth and pleasant and at no time do you feel like you’re pulling teeth. It’s just not robust enough for many users.
The essential issue is the lack of any ability to manually edit the HTML. For the simple functions Blogo provides, this is all rright, but since your text editing options are limited to bold, italics, underline, strike-through and hyperlink some users may run into trouble very soon. But, of course, the vast majority of bloggers are not “power users” and this will not be a problem. I, however, cannot write this post in Blogo as much as I’d like to (and believe me, I really would like to - I’m quite sad it doesn’t support what I need it to) I would not be able to configure my tags and catagories as I like, or create a bulleted list or use a blockquote - all things I do regularly, and I have to tweak some HTML in almost every post.
But, these were a design decision made by the developers. The advantages of Apple’s Webkit are extensive, but they are also a bit perverse and this trade-off was just one that had to be made and they felt it was worth it.
The price is $25, about halfway between the two major clients on the Mac (ecto and Marsedit) which may seem a bit steep, but if I could use it for my work here I’d probably shell out for it. This is a young product, and the developers are contining to expand and improve Blogo. The staff is helpful and friendly, and I’m anxious to see how this product progresses in the future.
(for the record, I’m currently using Fluid to use Wordpress’s built in editor - works like a charm!)
Update: Just a few minutes after I posted this ProBlogger Blog Tips posted a list of Mac tools for Bloggers, take a look!
25/02/2008 at 7:33 pm Permalink
I use ScribeFire plugin for Firefox, even though I’m a regular Safari user like you. In fact, this is the only reason I have Firefox installed.
It does most of what you need including HTML editing decent rich text and is super easy to get started.