A few housekeeping notes for those who follow along with these things

(more…)

It’s been exactly two weeks since this post about trying out various offline post editing tools, so here are my observations so far:

FCKEditor for WordPress: this is the one that installs as a plugin directly in WordPress, if you’ll recall. My biggest objection to this one is that it has to run a pantload of javascript to do its thing, which slows down the loading of the built-in post authoring page in WP. I did like the way it handled adding links and embedding images, but it seemed to add unnecessary cruft to the page source. It also didn’t handle blockquotes gracefully, which was a source of frustration every time I tried to use it. For now I have decided that it is not that much better than the built-in post authoring to use it regularly.

ecto: It kept throwing javascript errors at me and I don’t know if it’s the application or something in one of the posts I wrote that might have had a javascript in it (such as those posts with embedded video clips). Same deal as FCKEditor with trying to format blockquotes. I liked it okay, but I didn’t like it enough to pay $18.

ScribeFire: this one installs as an extension in Firefox and gives you the option of using it in its own window, in a splitscreen tab, or in its own tab. I liked that feature a lot — there are times when I might be trying to go back and forth between the post editor and the page I’m writing about, and having the split-screen view was easier than jumping back and forth between tabs. It has an annoying default setting that automatically inserts a “Powered by ScribeFire” tag at the bottom of each and every post, but at least you can turn it off. That would have been totally unacceptable if it had been baked in. Also not easy to work with blockquotes — are all these tools designed for bloggers who never quote anything? It also had the annoying but of not moving the cursor beyond the closing /a tag of a hyperlink, causing everything you type after the link to be included in the link. That’s a bug in my opinion.

Of those three, I definitely liked ScribeFire the best. BUT then somebody on AskMetaFilter suggested w.bloggar to another person looking for offline editors, so I downloaded the new “portable” version and tried it out. It’s great! “Portable” in this context means that the app is very small and runs without having to install it in Windows, which means you can put it on a USB flash drive and run it from there. It also feels more thoroughly developed than the other three in terms of the UI and the feature set. At last, BLOCKQUOTES! Also a spell checker and an UNDO feature. The HTML tags are highlighted in color, making it much easier to see where you screwed up a tag. All in all, a much better app…and it’s FREE (donations gladly accepted). I also like the idea of being able to keep the app on a USB flash rather than having to install it everywhere I go. The only feature I wish it had is autosave — I cn’t tell you how many times I’ve spent a long time writing a post, only to lose it because I clicked in the wrong place or something else crashed.

So I’m going to work with w.bloggar exclusively for a month or so to see how it really stands up over a full slate of posting. I’ll probably post one more update then.

I’m playing with a couple of different offline post editors this week. One is called Ecto and the other called ScribeFire. They both pretty much do the same thing, which is they let you compose your posts without using the online posting mechanism your blogging software comes with, including all the bells and whistles of inserting links, images, tags, etc., then they automatically log into your blogging control panel and post the entries for you. The primary advantage is that you don’t need to be connected to the Internet to write and format your posts — not extremely necessary if you’re in front of a computer with a 24/7 connection to the Internet, but could be handy for laptop users. I also installed a WordPress plugin called FCKEditor, which adds lots of formatting options directly to the WordPress posting screen. 

(If you haven’t guessed, I’m not entirely taken with the built-in mechanism and am interested in alternative ways of composing, formatting and posting to my blogs.)

The only substantive difference between the three is that one (Ecto) is a stand-alone application, one (ScribeFire) runs as a Firefox add-on, and one is a plugin for the blogging software itself. Without having done much more than to install them so far, I’m leaning toward FCKEditor because I almost always post “live” from my desktop computer. I’m least likely to stick with Ecto because it costs $17.95 for a permanent license, while the other two are free. I can see a middle path of using FCKEditor and ScribeFire so that I could blog offline when necessary.

If any of you passing through are WordPress users and have an opinion, I’d be glad to hear your reviews. If you use WordPress and are thinking about this sort of thing yourself (it has come up a couple of times on AskMetaFilter in the last few days, for example), I’ll post a comment or an update to this in a week or two and let you know what worked and didn’t.

Alt. Title: “Yo, howzabout a little breast and thigh meat, baby?”

You are invited to add your own captions. I might add some more as I think of them myself.

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the U.S., and may the rest of the world enjoy an America-free Thursday. Posting returns on Monday.