Is there a perfect blog editor? Does anyone care if there is?

[Paul Keith]

Anyone who's seen my profile knows I'm biased towards gmail and posterous and I never found a better blog editor than that but these topics are such a rare mention that it's always interesting to hear what people think:

Source: http://trishussey.com/2010/03/03/is-there-a-perfect-blog-editor-does-anyone-care-if-there-is/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ViewFromTheIsleByLarixConsulting+(A+View+from+the+Isle+by+Tris+Hussey)

Very soon after I started blogging, I started using a blog editor to power up my blogging (and prevent the “aiiigghhh I lost my connection and my post!!!!” which was very common at conferences, still is actually). In those days I was using Qumana for the most part, which makes sense since I was a part of the company and helping guide the growth of the app.

For its time, Qumana was a fantastic blogging app. It was almost perfect (I was always pushing for more and better refinement), but Qumana has long dropped from my toolkit as it hasn’t really been updated in a long time. After Qumana, I used Windows Live Writer. Again, almost perfect and probably one of the few apps I miss since switching to a Mac.

Right now my app of choice is Blogo and it’s good enough, but maybe not as great as I’d like. I have ecto, and while it’s good, it lacks a few refinements and doesn’t seem to have any active development going on, which always concerns me when choosing (and paying for) an app. Yesterday I bought the MacHeist nano bundle and it comes with MacJournal, which has a post to blog function. All of which has made me wonder if there is a perfect (Mac) blog editor, and if there is does anyone care?

The key here is the writing part of the blogging problem. I have now three apps for writing and note taking. Between Scrivener, where I do most of my book writing and a lot of other writing as well, Yojimbo, where I gather a lot of the links and such researching for books, etc., and MacJournal, which I haven’t really tried yet, I have a lot of potential blogging firepower, but little practical connections.

I can easily gather a ton of stuff in Yojimbo (I love it’s drop-tab area), but I can’t pull it together and publish from there (easily). I can write my brains out in Scrivener (which I do), and I can pull in a lot of stuff into it, but not as easily as Yojimbo, but I can’t publish directly to any of my blogs. The best I’ve been able to do is write it and copy and paste. I still have to add links and images to finish off the posts. MacJournal … well it might be able to post to my blog (I haven’t tried yet), but the whole collecting of stuff part is lacking.

Then comes the critical question—does anyone really care?

[Curt]

I am not one of those who might care too much about other people's blogging or blog editor problems (my Firefox spelling editor didn't know "blog" or "blogging" right now!), because I have not yet started a blog myself. But of course one day I just might, so I am curious how to maybe do it via Firefox. Did you try ScribeFire (or maybe you don't use Firefox or Chrome?) which some of the posts spoke so highly about?


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[rgdot]

It is one of those things that I search for and try to find better ones.
Many I know are satisfied by Windows Live Writer, I found it ok but I am not using it. ScribeFire seemed buggy (in getting formatting right, etc.) but I don't know its current status. Long ago I tried Thingamablog and it was ok as well.
But overall it doesn't really matter I think, recently I have been typing stuff in Google Docs and copy pasting into Wordpress.

[Paul Keith]

I am not one of those who might care too much about other people's blogging or blog editor problems (my Firefox spelling editor didn't know "blog" or "blogging" right now!), because I have not yet started a blog myself. But of course one day I just might, so I am curious how to maybe do it via Firefox. Did you try ScribeFire (or maybe you don't use Firefox or Chrome?) which some of the posts spoke so highly about?

Well, like I said, I wasn't really looking for a blog editor.

As far as Scribefire goes, I haven't used it long enough to encounter the formatting problems but for the most part I find blog editors to be slow compared to gmail and their cramped spaces don't allow for the length of blog posts I write compared to full screen/pop-up gmail textbox.

They're also for the most part "worrisome" to save drafts into and they still have options that get in the way compared to an e-mail box. I compare it to using Word over notepad.

In the end it's different purposes though. Blog editors are for backups while gmail is for me, ease of editing/typing over other editors with minimum fluff except what gmail offers.