And there's the older standard Blogger one, which has been there since around about the invention of, say, the cat:
These are, well, okay, but they have their quirks. First and foremost, uploading images is a serious pain, and tends to arbitrarily go horribly wrong. Although there are shortcut keys for bold and italic text, these are, on a Mac, non-standard (CTRL-B, CTRL-I), and sometimes just fail to work entirely. If you paste something from another site, weird things will happen; it'll try to drag along its existing formatting, which may or may not work properly. Too clever by half.
So, I decided to give a desktop blogging tool a go. It's called MarsEdit, is available for the Mac only, which I can live with as I only ever write blog posts on the Mac, and costs 30 dollars, with a 30 day free period. Here it is:
It's relatively simple, but really does seem to work well. All the usual suspects are supported; Wordpress, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, Tumblr, and of course my own beloved Blogger. It's not WYSIWYG, which is quite frankly probably a good thing; WYSIWYG HTML editing has never, despite the best intention of editor vendors, worked that well. It does, however, have keyboard shortcuts for basic HTML formatting, which work very nicely. This strikes me as a decent compromise.
Possibly the nicest bit is the upload facility. To put an image in your post, you just drag it in, and this comes up:
This is far more convenient than the Blogger upload thing, and just pops some HTML into your post; it doesn't make a weird sorta-movable image box thingy, like the Blogger upload does.
It's also, for some reason, just really nice to write posts in a desktop application; it feels far less irritating than using the Blogger webapp.
The preview tool is also rather nice; you get a live preview of your post in another window. You can give it the HTML template from your blog, and it shows you what your post will look like as you type it. Very nice.
There's offline draft saving, and support for tagging/categories, and support for that icky 'enclosure' thing that makes podcasts work, and, well, that's really about it. It's simple, but somehow very good. I couldn't tell you exactly why I like it so much, but I do.
Highly recommended, and I'm pretty sure I'll end up paying the 30 dollars (roughly seven euro cents at today's rate of exchange) when my trial period runs out. This is irritating; the only time I've spent money on software lately was for a few bits and pieces to make my (Windows) work machine a little more tolerable, but it can't be helped.
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