When I was deciding whether or not to move off my custom-built blogging system, I flirted briefly with Radio Userland. What I really liked about that software was that it was a desktop app. I know that that’s verboten in our Web-based world, but it was really handy having a little icon in the system tray instead of having to go to the Web site, log-in, wait for the server to respond, etc.
Well, I’m writing this entry from
w.bloggar, which is a desktop app that communicates with Movable Type via XML-RPC. It required absolutely no configuration on Movable Type — I just needed to enter my username and password, and point it at the mt-xmlrpc.cgi file on my install.
w.bloggar has a slick interface (non-WYSIWYG, but it has tabbed preview) with all the doo-dads: text-formatting, images, alignments, lists, etc. And — get this — it’s got a spell-checker. There’s a little button for “Posts” where I can download the last 5 or 10 posts (you can set the number) and pick one to edit. I make the changes locally, then post them back via XML-RPC. If something takes more that one session to write, I can save it as a .post file and come back to it later.
The only catch? It only does the title and the excerpt — no extended body (at least, not that I’ve seen yet — keep in mind that I’ve been working with it for all of 15 minutes now). I’ll keep working with it, so stay-tuned.
