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The Sad State of Desktop Blog Editors

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I'm kind of bummed today.

One of the items I had on my todo list was a rather fun, Friday afternoon kind of thing. I was especially looking forward to it after doing yet another go round on the pending ICANN Transfer Policy contracts that a working group I'm sitting on is looking after.

The task was supposedly simple - check out the current status of XML-RPC Blog editors, do some feature comparisons (and maybe even fall in love with something enough to start using myself and recommend to my users).

This was amplified a little bit because the one that I currently use is stuck in side of Newzcrawler which seems to have developed the nasty habit of consuming 100% of the available CPU resources on my box - totally suxors when you have it running in the background and you can't check your email without shutting down your aggregator. I think it might have something to do with the number of feeds I subscribe to and number of items in those feeds...but I digress.

So I trolled around to the usual suspects, w.bloggar, SharpMT, Zempt and so on - and quickly realized that *nothing* has changed with these apps in the last seven months. In fact, a couple of them no longer worked with my setup - something that I've now got to track down to make sure that we didn't break something (even though we've done nothing to our MetaWebLog/Blogger API interfaces...in the last eight months.)

So I went out to find a new tool that might work and be really cool (I generally love using software that no one else is using - call it an bizarre expression of my individualism...) Problem there is that most them totally suxor *worse* than the tools that I was fleeing.

Someone really needs to step up to the plate here. There's a huge market for these tools - especially ones that work well with aggregators.

I've got $40 for the first developer that puts a non-sucking client into my hands.

See this post as it first appeared on Blogware.

7 comments

Comments are closed - these are kept exactly as they were left.

  1. PICxpert, November 29, 2003

    Geez, you couldn't have waited until AFTER my exams to announce this? Now I won't have any time...

  2. PICxpert, November 29, 2003

    Oops, I completely forgot about the most critical part of that post:
    ;)

  3. Donny, November 29, 2003

    Ross,
    I completely agree with you, I'm currently using w.bloggar, and even though it has a spell checker, it's still pretty bad. I've seen a few people hack up htmlarea and use it and they have created some good looking stuff, but it's still not a stand alone application. Tell Tom he's got a new project. :) One way to make blogware stand out more!
    Donny

  4. dwlt, December 1, 2003

    Just out of curiousity, are there any specific features you'd like to see in such an application? I've been considering rolling my own for the reasons you've described.

  5. rickysan, December 1, 2003

    Try Broadcast Builder, it's located at http://www.lionhardt.com/bb it even supports blogware.com ;)

  6. rickysan, December 1, 2003

    Re: Broadcast Builder
    This tool is very much alive, so any suggestions on implementing features are always welcome!

  7. dwlt, December 2, 2003

    OK, let me put it another way: what don't you like about the other tools? ;-)