Desktop Blogging Tools
You have just seen how you can send HTML that encodes a photo and description from Flickr to a blog. It should not then be surprising to find out that you can send data to blogs from systems other than Flickr. Indeed, a whole genre of tools lets you compose and post blog entries in a more convenient environment (such as a desktop application) and then send those posts to your blog instead of having to use the native blog post interface. The following are examples of blogging clients:
w.bloggar (
http://www.wbloggar.com/) is a Windows desktop client.ecto (
http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/) for Windows and Mac OS X.MarsEdit (
http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/) is for Mac OS X.Windows Live Writer (
http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/) is a desktop client for Windows.BlogDesk (
http://www.blogdesk.org/en/index.htm) is a Windows desktop client.ScribeFire (
http://www.scribefire.com/) is a client right within Firefox.mo:Blog (
http:www.moblogworld.net/) is a client for Palm OS devices.
Some brave souls such as Jon Udell are even doing cutting-edge experiments of blogging from Microsoft Word 2007.[89]
Figure 5.3. Figure 5-3. Writing to a WordPress blog from the Windows w.bloggar client. Note that the post already exists on the blog and that w.bloggar is being used to post it for editing.
It is instructive to ponder why there are so many tools in this area, what exactly is being integrated by the tools, and the exact list of functionality in these tools. Answers to these questions shed light on how users actually write blogs. For instance, Brent Simmons’ description of MarsEdit, which he created, gives some insight into the genre:[90]
MarsEdit is weblog posting and editing software. It makes writing for the web like writing email: you open a window and write something, then send it to your weblog. It has many of the same features that email applications have: drafts, text editing commands, even AppleScript support. It also has features specific to weblogs: categories, text filters, trackbacks, pings, and so on. People that have more than one weblog find it especially useful because they have just one place to write and edit all their weblog posts, even if their weblogs are on different systems.