Insufficiently Advanced
April 10, 2003
Arthur Clarke stated that “Any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic”. This of course implies the corollary - “Any technology that IS distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced”.
I love being able to post to a blog from a desktop app. I’m currently using w.bloggar, which is nice, but leaves a few things to be desired. My hit list includes:
1) WYSIWYG editing. It’s not like I don’t know HTML, or like I can’t hit the preview window, but sometimes I find it distracting to have to look at markup when I’m writing. An embedded WYSIWYG editor with a “code view” option would be very nice.
2) Spellcheck. I’m not the greatest speller; spellcheck often keeps me from looking any stupider than absolutely necessary. w.bloggar includes a spellchecker, but its dictionary seems woefully short, and when I can’t spell it and the spellcheck can’t spell it, we’re definitely off in the weeds… Other products seem to sniff around and find Word’s dictionary; that would be very nice.
3) Smarter support of the target layout. Posting to Movable Type, it’d be nice to be able to have an entry body and extended entry. If we had excerpt and keyword, so much the better… Perhaps these aren’t exposed in XMLRPC? Similarly, I post to a lot of PostNuke sites, and the ability to separate “hometext” and “bodytext” (analogous to entry body and extended entry in MT) would be nice.
Is there a product out there that I’m missing that has all of this stuff? Ideally, along with the ability to post to PostNuke, although I’m afraid w.bloggar might be the only one to support that at the time being.
Although it doesn’t support PostNuke, I’ve played a bit with Kung Log on OS X; it looks very nice indeed, but I’ve not gotten around the problem that it doesn’t like MT hosted on IIS rather than Apache (something broken in soap:lite apparently, although it doesn’t seem to bother w.bloggar. If it wasn’t for that, I’d certainly be considering Kung Log for my MT posts at least.
Have I missed any good ones? Suggestions would certainly be welcome…
Hi Chuck,
Here something about your w.bloggar issues:
1) I’m working on finding a good and light way to implement this.
2) The problem is that my tool is Freeware and I had to use a free solution to the Spellcheck, if you find a more complete english wordlist let me know.
3) Stay tune on the site, next thursday I’ll release the v3.01 with some improvements, and now you’ll be able to configure a CSS file to the preview, so it would be easier to make the preview closer to the real blog.
Any other suggestion please post on our forums!
best regards,
Marcelo Cabral
http://wbloggar.com