In the first part of this series, I reviewed Microsoft’s Live Writer. Live writer is a brand new product and still in its beta form. In this article, I review an established Post2Blog 2 currently in RC2.

This window’s only editor, from ByteScout has a solid history with me. I had originally been blogging with it when I was trying out different platforms and services. It requires 11 Mb of memory to open and an average document like this, is only 17 Mb of memory to run. The full install takes 27 Mb of disk space and is quick and simple. Setting up your blog is simple if you are on one of these platforms: Blogger, Movable Type, Typepad, or Wordpress.

The editor’s interface is simple to navigate. Everything is laid in an intuitive manner, with most things visible. The drop down options under some of the buttons, I found useful but it took a little bit to get used to it. There are still some features that don’t work, like stuff under the Publish button and Microsoft Word integration. The Microsoft Word integration was a nice feature in version 1 and I hope they can get it working for the final release of version 2. The application is rounded out with a nice array of tools that are designed to help the user out.

The formatting features work mostly as expected and better than Live Writer. Lists, font styles, and block quotes all work well, but setting the font face is quirky like in Live Writer. In Post2Blog it works just the opposite of Live Writer, you can’t change the font face and size until after you have typed something. Here again though, it would be nice if there was a way to set the default font face and size for a blog.

Drag and Drop images where you want them and then right click to get their properties. If you want to resize just change the size right there by dragging the corner. Unfortunately, the rest of the image manipulation is not as powerful as in LW and lacks the special effects. The UI for the images uses drop down menus, I liked the icon buttons for alignment in LW better. Links are pleasure here. Copy the url to your clipboard, highlight the text you want to make into a link and do a ctrl + k and viola it bring up the tool with all the info filled in. Add an alt tag and select if you want it in a new window or not and you are done. Simple.

Kudos to ByteScout as well for the multiple options to save. They give you the option to save locally, publish, and publish as draft. I tend to work at multiple machines, but find the standard Wordpress editor clunky to use. Spell check works, but its not integrated with the Microsoft Word dictionary so you will have to keep two updated.

The category tool/widget is easy to navigate and use. Alphabetically sorted and check boxes make it a powerful tool. Updating the list is done nicely with a link or a ctrl+b. Maybe its the API’s that don’t support it, but neither LW nor Post2Blog support creating categories on the fly. I will have to investigate that as this series progresses.

Finally its integration with IE, Firefox, and Outlook make a nice way to keep a blog updated quickly. Though as a corporation I would be wondering about Outlook integration. As a basic editor its not bad. You get all the basic functionality and some added nice features. It being called a release candidate I think is a bit optimistic. Live Writer’s beta felt more complete than this RC. With a price tag I don’t find it a worthwhile purchase.

Part 3: My Recommendation

Technorati Tags: Blog Editors, Reviews, Wordpress, TypePad, Post2Blog, Movable Type

I will have a full review of Post2Blog shortly, but I wanted to give some initial feed back here. I like the quick snippets feature, though the first time that I typed in Post2blog and it filled in a paragraph of text it was very surprising. The formatting of text is quirky in similar way to Live Writer, in that to change the font you have to have text already there. Otherwise, it is very similar to Writer. The image functions aren’t as nice or intuitive as Write, but once you get the hang of it is not too bad. Although I do miss the extras like drop shadow in Write. Post2Blog does have some nice features that aren’t include in Writer. The table editor is a nice feature, but again doesn’t work as smoothly as I had anticipated. Quick Snippets takes some practice to get used to and the More_Text_Tag is a nice feature too. More to come later…

Technorati Tags: Blog Editors, Post2Blog, Reviews

If you are having post problems with Wordpress 2.04, you aren’t the only one. You submit a post and wait and wait and wait until finally you get a blank screen, a timeout error, or you are asked to download the php file. The issue is that you are using pingomatic which can take a while to return results. There is hope though for us until Wordpress gets an update. Robert Deaton’s wp-no-ping-wait does a great job of fixing this issue. Unfortunately, Robert’s site is down because of hardware issues. If enough people post comments here asking for it, I will be happy to place it someplace publicly accessible.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jay Gilmore , of the Smashing Red Blog, has found a site that has the wp-no-ping-wait plugin.  Thanks again Jay!

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, wp-no-ping-wait, Wordpress posting errors, blogging, tutorials, usability

Blog editors are everywhere.  They can be the one included with the platform or can be a stand alone application.  There are even Firefox extensions that are blog editors.  I will be reviewing each editor as I use and then will give a summary of them at the end of the series.

To give each editor that I will be reviewing a chance, I will be using each for two weeks (about 6 live posts and some drafts and tests).  The requirements will be available platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, Browser); Memory requirements and disk space (Windows only); Images, Links and Maps; Drafts (local and online); Posting (title, keywords, custom fields, properties, and trackbacks);   and finally formatting.

I have been using MS Live Writer for the past two weeks and find it very impressive.  It is a windows only editor.  Requires about 30 Mb of memory to run, more if you use allot of images or if you are wordy like I am.  You will need 33 Mb of disk space to install it do to the other parts of Windows live that need to be installed.  The actual editor is only 8Mb. 

Drag and Drop images where you want them then click to bring up the image properties.  The real time resizing is also a nice feature.  The visual tools for image manipulation round out the image piece making very easy to use.  Links are very basic, the ability to add an alt tag to it would make it complete.  The map feature is a nice feature, but I would have very little need for it.  Others might and your mileage will vary.

Drafts can be handled locally or posted to wordpress as a draft.  A feature I found very useful and lacking in other editors.  Local drafts are saved as HTML files.  Spellcheck can be enabled or disabled to run automatically on posting. 

Its drop down for category is easy to use and easy to refresh from the server.  It would be nice though if this list was sorted alphabetically or at least if the user was given the option to sort it that way.  It would also be nice if you could create categories from the client as well. 

Integration with the standard Word spell checker is a nice feature as well as is the integration into IE and a Firefox extension to do a blog about this page.  Nice Job Live Writer Team for including Firefox. 

If you are looking for a MS Word type editor, you will be sorely disappointed.  While this is a feature rich editor, its formatting capabilities are a bit awkward to use.  The use of the defined types (paragraph and headings) is a nice drop interface, but its not as intuitive.  You can only select the style before you start typing.  It won’t allow you to highlight some text and change its style.  Really a nuisance more than anything else.  The other features, of font style, lists, and block quotes work as expected.  There was no tool to add a table, nor was there a way to add a default style of font face or size.

Overall Live Writer is a pleasure to use, even though it is in beta right now.  Hopefully, they will hear and listen to their users and fix the small details.

Part2 of this series: Review of Post2Blog

Technorati Tags: Blog Editors, Reviews, Microsoft, Live Writer, MS Live Writer

I have updated my list of plugins. I am always on the look out for plugins that will enhance my blog for the user and make it easier to maintain. The additions to the list are at the bottom and fall into both of those categories.

In the near future I will be doing a review and comparison of some of the top desktop blog editors with a comparison against the builtin wyswig editor in Wordpress 2.0

Technorati Tags: Blogging, blogger, wordpress, open source, keywords, google, sitemap, templates, search engine