Using Blogger's Post Editor

What do you use for publishing entries to your blog?

When I started out, I exclusively used Blogger's web–based post editor in compose view. This is the default method most new bloggers use. Others with a different blog platform would probably use their blog's control center to draft, edit and publish posts. After you went through the hassle of setting up your blog—specially if it is a self–installed one—you don't want to mess around with other software. You just want to start blogging now. As for me, I didn't even know that other tools exist. So, t'was the Compose view for me. Besides, it looks WYSIWYG enough for me to avoid the code, or so it seems.

However, I found some problems with this method. After writing a post, changing the font, writing some more, adding an image, changing the font again on some parts, rearranging text, changing indentation, and then changing the font of quoted text, the editor became confused. Clicking on preview would show that the latest changes were not applied and some get mixed up. The cause became apparent when I peeked into the generated HTML of my post—it was so grubby. There were empty span elements on one corner, nested spans contradicting each other with different font–families, empty div elements from where an image was moved, and other unsightly junk.

The post editor does not seem to generate clean HTML once it gets confused from multiple changes. It might work better if you just compose your opus first, apply the formatting only after the text has been finalized so that additional changes are avoided, then immediately publish the post. But me being me, this is a tough thing to do. While composing, I need to emphasize text and style quotes then and there because after 400 words or so, I might forget which text to emphasize. I'd then have to spend a considerable time reading the text more closely and hunting for those words I previously intended to emphasize.

I can't blame Blogger for this. It won’t be easy to migrate the functions of a full–fledged HTML code generator or WYSIWYG editor to a web application specially when you consider that it should run on a variety of platforms like Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, Chrome, Flock, and others. Even simple web pages render differently in these different browsers.

With the shortcomings of the post editor's compose view, I decided to use the Edit HTML view. Here, I'd have to manually enter HTML but it won’t be much of a problem as I'm not really that afraid to code. Of course, it would have been much better if I could simply focus on the post.

Everything went well since then except for the fact that I have to manually type all those tags. Imagine all those additional keystrokes. It also gets kind of confusing reading through your post with all those tags. I needed something more; something with an insert HTML tags capability and syntax highlighting to make coding and reading easier. I knew that I can only get that in an offline editor.

But it's not only the monochromatic nature of the online post editor and its insistence that I type each and every HTML tags manually that led me away from it; It also auto–saves my post as draft after a certain time. That's a feature!, you say. True, but this feature uses the text in your Title field as the filename of the post when it is auto–saved. Being the filename of your post, it appears as part of the post URL. If the Title field is empty, because maybe you've yet to decide on one, then it uses the first few words of your post as its filename which, again, becomes part of the post's URL. The problem arises when you change your title or populate the previously empty field. The new title would now be different from the filename and the URL. This would affect your SEO potential. I also do not want to disable this feature even if I can because that would increase the probability of data loss.

So I have to resort to offline means. This way I can use an application which can assist me in inserting those interesting but difficult to type HTML tags and highlight them for easy reading. I can now also allow auto–save on my work offline thereby preventing the possibility of data loss while being free from an undesired automatically generated URL. The search for the best offline editor started and I found a lot of free options so I downloaded and tried them all. I'll share with you my first impression on each of these tools in my next posts so that those time spent clicking and exploring would not be put to waste. Who knows, you might be like me who thought that there are no other worlds beyond the blog's post editor.