Tong Family

Time once again for a review of blog editing tools. I’ve been looking for the perfect offline tool and “Messyworkbench”:http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/MyMessyWorkbench/archives/2003/12/editing_your_blogs_offline_not_ready_for_primetime.php provided a good overview to which I’ll add:
# I’ve been using “Zempt”:http://zempt.com for a while and like it. Unfortunately, its not been maintained for a while and sometimes doesn’t work. Fails to post. The best feature I think is that it has a Zempt This! button for IE. I can’t tell you how convenient this is. Other nice thing is that it can handle multiple logons to different sites. Very nice for folks like me with both “personal”:https://tongfamily.com and “public”:http://geekfishing.net sites.
# “w.bloggar”:http://wbloggar.com is probably the first one that I used. Like Zempt it appears to crash with some perl errors every so often. It doesn’t have a push button, but is much richer in terms of HTML editing. Since I use Textile 2 for markup though, that’s not really a big deal.
# “SharpMT”:http://www.randyrants.com/sharpmt/. This is probably my favorite for right now. Best features are that you can edit multiple entries offline (he calls them blog links). This makes editing really fast. The other editors force a server round trip everytime you change an entry. Also has a plug in architecture, but that isn’t used much. This BTW is a .NET client application and I can see why people like the many UI widgets .NET has. Having multiple panes for editing is very nice for attention-deficit people like me. The spell checker is nice too!
# MT Post This! Ironically, this is still the one I prefer the most because it autodiscovers trackback links. Something I use a bunch of. The other ones, you’ve got to manually get stuff out of them. It also lets you highlight a selection and stuffs it into the entry.