I’ve been musing on what I believe would make the perfect desktop blogging client. I’ve used a number of different blog clients and taking inspiration from each of them, decided what would make the perfect blogging client for me.

The installation, of course, should be very simple and adding the blogs should be quick & easy. Type in the URL for the xmlrpc file, username and password and the program should be able to do the rest like QumanaLE. Of course, there can be the advanced set up for people who need to add some extra functions and rules.

After installation, managing the blogs should be just as easy. I rather enjoy the tree structure that Ecto sports, but wouldn’t mind having a drop down menu. In other words, each blog should be easily accessible within one click. Also, the blogs should be listed in alphabetical order or the user should be able to alter/manage the display order of the blogs.

Next is templates. This is something that has been lacking in each of the desktop blogging applications I’ve tested, possibly because it’s too difficult, I really don’t know. But, it would be nice to customize the preview templates for each blog so that the post can be previewed in its blog skin without needing to post it first. w.bloggar attempts this, but unfortunately, it’s not very flexible and takes quite a bit of tweaking just to get a marginally working preview template.

For the actual editor, a WYSIWYG interface is always nice, but it definitely needs to be accompanied by an HTML editor and it must be easy to change between the two.

I appreciate the flexibility that w.bloggar affords with creating custom HTML tags and assigning keyboard shortcuts to them.

Real time spell checking with a visual indicator (you know, the squiggly red underline) would be nice. Having a thesaurus alongside the dictionary and spell check utilities like in QumanaLE would also be a plus.

Being able to select multiple categories, a section for the excerpt, the content, and faltering the date/time of an entry is an absolute must have. It would also be nice to cross post to different blogs at the same time - this would mostly come in handy for those who run blog networks and want to put out a network wide message. It’s also nice to be able to publish entries that have already been published to the blog.

An important and often overlooked aspect of the blogging client is the code it outputs. I like code that is legible and compliant whether or not my site is done in HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.1. The editor needs to utilize as little proprietary code as possible and use the most current markup as outlined by the W3C. It would be very nice if it took into account which blogging software automatically converts paragraphs and line breaks and not add them.

To be quite honest, I’ve been using w.bloggar for a while now and regardless of what other blogging clients I test, I always return to it. It has almost everything I want in a desktop blogging and while others have come close, very close, they can’t quite duplicate it.

w.bloggar would actually be perfect if only a few small changes were made to it:

  • All the blogs should be accessible from the drop down menu without needing to click on the “Select Account” button (or pressing F9)
  • All the blogs should be listed in alphabetical order or the user should be able to change the order of the blogs in the drop down menu - also, the size of the window should be flexible as well. Some of the names are currently truncated.
  • A WYSIWYG editor. I don’t mind looking at code, I do it for nearly 8 hours a day, but sometimes I’d like to just write an entry and see blue underlined text for a link or the image I inserted without needing to switch to the ‘preview’ pane.
  • A thesaurus. Not a deal breaker, but definitely innovative. Plus, I wouldn’t need to use TheSage anymore.
  • More flexibility with tweaking the ‘preview’ template. Right now, you can alter a few things to make the preview template look similar to the website, but being able to create your own using a few tokens such as %title% and %content% would be nice
  • Better audio/image handling. Again, not a deal breaker, but it would be nice to have a way to record something and just upload it to the site with the link already in place (similar to BlogJet). It would also be nice to choose which folder an image/file will be uploaded to before upload
  • Better installed spell check dictionary. I’ve noticed that common words, such as Monday, Tuesday, etc. aren’t recognized (and yes, I’m using the correct dictionary - American English)

It’s been suggested on Marcelo’s website that he makes w.bloggar open source and release the code so others can improve upon it. I think it would be a great idea and interesting to see what others are able to do with it, but something that shouldn’t be forced upon him.

But, in the meantime, if someone (or a company) was to come out with such a desktop blogging client, I would be more than happy to shell out the dollars for it because it would make me infinitely more productive.