Offline Post Editors / Blog Clients: The Final Showdown

I made individual reviews of Deepest Sender and ScribeFire as these post editors are of a different breed—they are application extensions. Semagic is also different because while it can post to a variety of blog platforms, it leans more toward LiveJournal journals rather than blogs.

Bleezer and the other editors I looked at, though, have a larger set of common features. So here, we will tackle them together and will be looking only at their differences and their unique features. Common editing functions such as bold, italics and underline, and html functions such as adding lists and quotes, are presumed available unless otherwise specified.

For the sake of completeness, previously reviewed post editors will also be given some space here.

Deepest Sender

Deepest Sender is a lightweight Firefox extension which might be enough for most bloggers using LiveJournal or Wordpress. I can’t make it connect to Blogger, though. So if you are using Blogger, you might want to pass this up until the issue is resolved or you know some arcane connection settings for this post editor.

But if it can connect to your blog platform, then Deepest Sender is worth a try. It has a small footprint and allows you to blog about a page you happen land while surfing. Spell checking is provided via Firefox 3 or Firefox extension. It also allows you to enter CSS Statements which you can use to mimic the look of your blog and thereby achieve some degree of WYSIWYG capability.

ScribeFire

This one has surprising WYSIWYG capability for a small application which runs on Firefox. When you click on preview, it asks you if you’d like it to download your blog’s theme. If you click yes, it would make a temporary post just to download your blog’s theme and immediately delete the post after the download. The downloaded theme is then used when you preview again. As this is the same theme used in your blog, it achieves a high degree of WYSIWYG functionality.

With ScribeFire, you can easily promote your blog. It allows you to notify about nine social bookmarking sites right from the post editor.

It is also possible to insert ads in your posts using ScribeFire’s own ads system. To use this, you first have to register to ScribeFire Quick Ads. Quick Ads is like an ads middleman. Using Quick Ads, you can serve ads from networks like AdSense, Kontera, IntelliTXT and others without having to deal with each one of them.

Semagic

Unlike the previous two, Semagic is a stand-alone offline blog client which does not need Firefox in order for it to run. But instead of automatically downloading your blog’s template like what ScribeFire does, it only allows you to specify a local template file. This file may be one of those included with the application or one you make on your own. The former, obviously, won’t be similar to your blog’s template; so, you won’t be achieving WYSIWYG functionality using them. You have to make your own which mimics your blog’s template.

This editor, however, has a distinctive LiveJournal flavor to it. That may or may not be a problem depending on whether you post to LiveJournal or not. If you do, then it’s a feature; if you don’t, then it’s a distraction.

Bleezer

I still haven’t figured out how to make it connect to Blogger; but if you use other platforms, then that may not be a problem at all. If you want a simple and easy to use post editor and do not use Firefox or don’t care about Firefox extensions, then Bleezer would seem to be a good match. Just remember that it does not allow you to specify templates. So, WYSIWYG functionality is not one of its strong points.

However, it can be argued that when it comes to the Web in general and to blogging in particular, there is no true WYSIWYG editors. Your readers could easily resize and shrink their browser windows or change their browser’s background color, font style, font face and font color, among other things. If they do, your efforts at WYSIWYG goes down the drain. This is not even counting the fact that some readers might be using old or non-compliant browsers which would probably display your page incorrectly, if at all. And if they use Lynx, good luck with that.

BlogDesk

BlogDesk is also a clean and simple offline blog client/post editor which currently does not support Blogger. It also has the usual spelling, editing and HTML features. Like Bleezer, you don’t need a manual to use this editor. The buttons and menu options are easily recognizable. Nothing gets in the way between you and your first post with this editor—unless you use Blogger.

Post2Blog

Post2Blog has features and buttons galore! In addition to the usual spell checker, it has the ability to look words up in a thesaurus. It can also clean MS Word HTML if you happen to use word formatted documents. It is also possible to export posts to pdf.

If you are the kind who likes to add smiles to your post, then you’re going to have fun with this editor. Uploading photos to your Flickr account can also be done as with ScribeFire.

For those interested in HTML source editing, Post2Blog has a decent HTML editor and allows more HTML tags to be added with a click of a button. You can instantly add snippets and insert HTML from a file or in a dialog box. These are handy if you frequently use the same blocks of HTML code. The editor can be set to generate either XHTML or HTML code.

The problem I have with this editor is that it does not show the titles of my posts when I try to retrieve them. Instead of the title, “<no subject>” appears. But it displays the body ok. I also cannot find the option to add templates for WYSIWYG preview. But if you are not bothered by this and want a feature rich editor, then this is a nice candidate.

w.bloggar

w.bloggar, like Post2Blog, is a very nice post editor (for those like me who like to tweak html). In fact, w.bloggar only lets you compose in HTML view unlike other editors which let you compose in Compose view and tweak in HTML view. However, w.bloggar makes HTML editing easy. You can easily insert tags with a click of a button. It is also possible to define your own tags and named entities.

HTML Editing seems to be the strength of this post editor. You can design web pages with this post editor better than with text editors without HTML extensions. It would even seem like w.bloggar is an HTML editor with the added feature of being able to post to your blog.

But like Post2Blog, it does not display post titles properly. It displays a string of numbers for a post’s title. Its download template function won’t work if your Blogger blog uses layouts. So if your blog uses Blogger layouts, you won’t have WYSIWYG.

Qumana

I actually do not know why but the user interface of Qumana is quite refreshing. It is as clean and elegant as BlogDesk and Bleezer but works with my Blogger blog. It may not be as feature rich as Post2Blog or w.bloggar but it displays my post titles properly.

Qumana also has its own Ad Network called QAds. After registering with QAds, you can easily add ads to your posts using Qumana.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any support for templates so those interested in WYSIWYG might not be pleased.

Zoundry Raven

Zoundry Raven is one of the best offline post editor / blog client for me. For direct html editing, it is the best. End of story. If it could only save in HTML, I could use this as an HTML editor. For general posting, it comes second only to Windows Live Writer. But since it has just been released as Open Source, it could improve rapidly in the near future.

Raven has the HTML editing power of w.bloggar and the simplicity of Qumana. Like Qumana, its interface is clean and unobtrusive but has more power under the hood. Like w.bloggar, it edits HTML like there’s no tomorrow complete with tag and attribute completion (Ctrl+Spacebar)! In addition, it reads my post titles properly.

As to WYSIWYG functionality, it supports downloading of your Blogger template if you tell it to. So, your preview would look just like what it would on your blog.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is what I am currently using right now. It has one feature I really, really like—word count. No other post editor that I have tried included this feature. Also, I do not have to do anything to display the word count—its already there in the status bar. All I have to do is look down a little bit and the number is there (you have to set it in Options|Editing first).

Another plus for Windows Live Writer is plug-ins. This makes it easy to extend Writer. You can find all sorts of plug-ins in Writer’s plug-ins page which you can then plug in Writer. But one plug-in that I find hard to be without is the Dynamic Template plug-in by Joe Cheng. It lets me add HTML tags not provided by Writer such as cite, quote, and keyboard tags. You can also use C# statements. With this capability, you can make your own plug-in in a plug-in.

Like Raven, it has good WYSIWYG functionality. It downloads your blog’s template and uses it for previewing. Its image handling and manipulation is superb. You can do a lot of things to images which you normally need an external image editor for.

A Word About Images

If you insert images in your post from the internet, almost all post editors will have no problems with that. If the image resides locally in your computer, however, the ride starts to get a little bumpy.

If you use Blogger’s online post editor and insert an image residing in your hard disk, Blogger uploads the image to their servers and inserts it to your post. If you use an offline post editor, it won’t get uploaded to Blogger’s servers so it has to be hosted somewhere else for you to be able to link to it.

I did not discuss this in the individual post editor reviews as this is not a post editor problem. Blogger simply does not allow it. For a lot of post editors, the only solution would be to upload the images first to an image hosting service provider like Picasa or Flickr then to link to it.

Raven and Writer have a way around this though. You can configure both to automatically upload the image somewhere else like in Flickr, Picasa, or ImageShack.us and then link to it.

While using offline post editors would require additional steps when it comes to inserting images to your posts, it still beats using Blogger’s online post editor. Editing and formatting text with offline post editors are still more flexible and convenient that I am willing to take the additional steps to insert the occasional image. Moreover, it is really not that difficult after you have tried it even just once.

Conclusion

Since I use Blogger, three of the post editors mentioned here are automatically off the list for being unable to connect to my blog. Semagic is too LiveJournal for my taste while w.bloggar and Post2Blog have problems with post titles. That leaves me with ScribeFire, Qumana, Zoundry Raven and Windows Live Writer. Since I need something more than what the first two can provide such as good HTML editing support and image uploading, I settled with Writer and Raven and use one or the other depending on the mood.

Others might want something simpler so the first two might be a better choice. ScribeFire also has good blog template support and WYSIWYG capability while Qumana is simple, clean and elegant.

Those using Wordpress have a wider array of choices. For example, w.bloggar and Post2Blog might not have problems with titles in their particular platform. But I still think that they should consider the four that work well with Blogger for maximum flexibility and compatibility.