A Quick Look at Bleezer

If you are using Blogger like I do, then we’re out of luck. I cannot make Bleezer work with my Blogger blog. Unfortunately, the latest entry in its website was made last July 1, 2007. This could mean that Bleezer is not being actively developed at the moment and that we cannot expect a fix any time soon.

But I read reports while surfing the Web that this post editor works with Wordpress.com and, presumably, with Wordpress.org. If you use one of those platforms, read on; I’ll share to you what little I could with this software.

You can do the usual formatting commands using the toolbar buttons such as bold, italics, underline and strikethrough. For most, this is all they’ll ever need. The markup code that is generated by the editor are mostly presentational and not structural. Instead of of marking up text with the <strong> tag, for example, it uses <b> which is less than ideal. But if you are not a stickler with standards, that shouldn’t be a problem.

In addition to the common formatting commands, you can also add blockquotes, lists, links and images. Image handling, however, is simple. For blogs, where you really don’t need extensive image editing, this is not a show stopper. Most images that you insert are already edited, anyway. Adding headings is a manual affair. You have to go to html view and add heading tags there yourself because the compose view does not provide automatic formatting of headings. Alternatively, you can just select the heading and format it as a different font and increase its size. That should also do the trick.

It has a built in spell checker which is nice. I really believe that this functionality should be present in all offline post editors or blog clients anyway. I’d rather have an editor which does not have common formatting functionality rather than one without a spell check capability. It is better to memorize the markups used for common formatting and add them manually than to memorize all the commonly (and the not-so-commonly) misspelled words and manually hunt for them in a 600-word post. If you encounter one without a spell checker, dump it immediately. There are better editors out there.

The WYSIWYG functionality would have been better if it lets you specify a style which would allow you to mimic your blog’s template just like what Deepest Sender does. This post editor is not WYSIWYG in a way that the word is commonly understood. However, WYSIWYG is all relative. It could display faithfully to one browser but not to another. So in a strict sense, there really is no true WYSIWYG post editor as there are always different browsers which always displays things differently.

In sum, if you use Wordpress and want a simple and uncluttered offline post editor, Bleezer could serve you well. It is also a good option if you want a simple editor but don’t want Deepest Sender or ScribeFire because you don’t (or won’t) use Firefox for one reason or another (like if you use Opera or Chrome). Finally, with Bleezer, you do not need to wade through pages of a manual in order to publish your first post. The user interface is your manual.