A Quick Look at Semagic

Semagic 1.7.3.3U is the first stand-alone client I have reviewed so far. Unlike Deepest Sender and ScribeFire, this is not a Firefox extension. But similar to Deepest Sender, though in a much greater degree, Semagic has a LiveJournal flavor to it. It leans more towards posting to a journal than to a blog.

But if you can get over the fact that your blog is called a journal and your post title, a subject, then Semagic could work for you. I was able to post to my blogger blog and then edit that post using Semagic. Deepest Sender did not even allow me to post.

Looking at the toolbar tells us that the usual suspects are there. You can do common formatting tasks and add links and images. It also has a built-in spell checker called MySpell though you have the option of using MS Word’s spell checker instead. A nice thing about its WYSIWYG formatting is that it generates structural markups like emphasis tags instead of the presentational markups like italics and bold tags.

In addition, it has LiveJournal specific features like the ability to view your friends list and detect the music you are currently playing. I really do not know much about these features as I don’t have a LiveJournal account but for those of you who are interested, you can give this a try.

As to its WYSIWYG capability, it does allow you to specify a separate file as your template which will then be the presentational basis of your post when you preview it. Since it does not automatically download the blog’s template, I tried downloading it myself and specified the local file as my template in Semagic’s setting. Semagic, however, cannot read it.

So, you either have to make your own template or modify the one provided by default. If you just want to set your blog’s width in Semagic so that images and text wrap in the editor just like they would in your blog, then you could just use the width CSS property with a value of 400px and enclose the whole thing in a body selector like so:

body {width:400px;}

If you remember, this was the work-around we used with Deepest Sender. But this will not make the font style, size and color similar to that in your blog. You still have to add those properties.

Is Semagic WYSIWYG? It certainly is, but only with respect to the current template it is using. Most current WYSIWYG editors work in a similar way—using local templates. Some just download the template transparently in the background while others let you do the downloading or the creation of the templates. Without templates, no post editor could determine how your blog is set to display your posts.

If you don’t mind the slight emphasis on LiveJournal, then Semagic is worth a try. However, you have to work a little harder to make its preview look as close to your blog as possible. This would be a good software for someone who posts in both LiveJournal and Blogger.