A Quick Look at Deepest Sender

After I had been comfortable using a text and HTML editor to do my offline post editing, I started experimenting on desktop blog clients. And as I always do, I started with the simplest solution.

Deepest Sender 0.9.0 is a Firefox extension. As such, it still relies on the Firefox web browser (and other foxy browsers using a similar engine). But unlike web-based post editors like Blogger’s, it does not have to deal with a variety of browsers and is therefore not limited to the lowest common denominator as I have already discussed in my previous post under the heading: Using Offline Blogging Tools. It is somewhat of a cross between web-based post editors which you access remotely and native stand-alone applications.

But speaking of stand-alone applications, Deepest Sender can be made to look just like one. Just create a shortcut to Firefox in your Desktop and append the following to the shortcut’s Target field:

-chrome chrome://deepestsender/content/

Double clicking on the shortcut launches Deepest Sender. Firefox is also launched in the background but you won’t see it, giving the impression that Deepest Sender is a stand-alone application.

The beauty of this editor is that it uses only a small amount of system resources in addition to that used by Firefox. Since I always open Firefox when blogging to check links and search for stuff, launching Deepest Sender would use up lesser additional resources than when opening a separate full-blown application.

Spell checking is provided by another simple Firefox extension named Spellbound. But if you are using an English version of Firefox 3, no further extensions are necessary.

Someone made a comment on my previous post stating his problem regarding the difference in how an image is presented in the post editor and how it is finally presented in the blog. This is a valid concern and Deepest Sender seems to have a solution.

In the Tools|Options menu, you can set styles in the Formatting Options tab. Just check both checkboxes and in the stylesheet text field, enter: body {width: 400px;}. Replace 400px with the actual width of your post column as defined in your particular template. If you cannot find it or don’t know how to, 400px is a good place start. You can try increasing or decreasing it if you want to.

While you would edit your posts in the Normal tab where the HTML is generated for you, you could also modify and add HTML elements in the Source tab. The Source view, however, is not a very capable HTML editor. It does not have syntax highlighting and auto-completion or tag insertion. But if you do not care about HTML, then that won’t be a problem.

Another cool feature it has is a “blog this” functionality. If you find something interesting while surfing and want to blog about it, just select a bunch of text in that page, right click it and select Send to Deepest Sender. Deepest Sender would then open with your selected text as a quote.

One big minus for this editor is that although the documentation said it works with Blogger, it doesn’t. I read a post in LiveJournal that Deepest Sender isn’t able to connect to Blogger for some time now. But at least, the poster tells us that it worked with LiveJournal. I also found a blog post confirming that Deepest Sender also works in Wordpress.

This could just be due to the frequent improvements Blogger is making which affects their API. Hopefully, this will be corrected in Deepest Sender’s update or new release.

For now, if you use Blogger, you have to look elsewhere.