« Draft 802.11n Standard Fails To Pass | Home | VoIP Live in Galveston County »
Qumana Blogging Software
By Larry Hendrick | May 3, 2006
My experiment with the three blogging software packages is now narrowed to two. This report is about Qumana software and what I have discovered about it and it’s features. I am using 3.0.0 Beta 3 for the purposes of testing the three challengers of this contest for the best blogging software.
Qumana was very easy to install and configure for several of my blogs, with auto-discovering working very well. It picked up the current categories of my Wordpress sites and displays them in a box to the right of the writing area. To simplify the description, here is a screen shot of this article. 
Putting the picture into this article is much harder than it should be and the software does not offer the option of inserting a thumbnail with automatic handling for the full size picture. The picture does give you the idea of the general layout of the software, however.
The interface is pleasing to the eye and the different features are easily accessible to the user. The text formatting buttons are across the top and allow for bold, italics, and underlining along with alignment tools for left, center, right, or justified with highlighting and the click of a button.
Once the text is where you want it, you can build bulleted lists, again with a quick click and typing.
-
You can have a standard un-numbered list
-
That allows for putting your items in nice order
Or you can use a numbered list
- using standard
- outlining one number deep.
Indent and un-indent is also available by putting the curser where you want and clicking the button. It’s that easy for indenting and marking a block-quote, which is a common need.
The other big feature is spell checking that can be turned on to alert you to mistyped words as you type with the ever annoying red squiggly line. The only problem with this feature is that is puts a red squiggly line under every work you type until the word is complete. Before completion, the line follows the curser letting you know the, so far, this is not a known word. I have turned it off and just run the spell checker before posting an article the nice part is you get to decide what you want to do with it. Check as you go, or all at one time.
Qumana allows you to sign up for an account that lets you insert ads into your blog posts and get paid when someone clicks the link. You are not required to sign up or insert ads, but it is available if you use your site to generate money to pay for the hosting or bandwidth charges.
Here’s the biggest issue I have with this package and why it is the first eliminated from my competition. Qumana does not allow me to set the time I want it to post to my site. Articles written in Qumana post when you publish them and I can find no way around this, and for me this is the death nail. Because of the way I write, this is the second most used item for me. I work on several articles at the same time and might finish them within ten or fifteen minutes of each other. By setting the publish time, I can keep two articles from posting at almost the same time. I also use it to publish articles that are not time sensitive as far as a week in advance in case I get really busy and don’t have time to finish anything else I am working with.
It does, however allow you to allow or dis-allow comment and trackbacks from the choices to the right of the typing area. Also, if you want more room to work with, you are able to hide the properties box and use the full width of your screen.
One feature that I forgot to mention is that the link button will automatically fill in with what ever is on the clipboard, so if you copy an address for a website, all you have to do to insert it is click the link button and it auto fills for you. It made hyper-linking each mention of the software in the article easy to do.
Lately, I have notices several prominent bloggers using Qumana software, and if not for the biggest shortcoming for me, it would still be in contention. If future releases add this feature (future publishing), and they make the picture handling better and easier, I may take another look, however, the other two candidates, BlogDesk and zBlogWriter, do both of these well, although the future publishing will not be completely fixed until the next release.
This article is written and published using the Qumana blogging software. As you can see, it does have a lot of versatility and plenty of features for most writers. By eliminating this software from the competition, I do not want to leave the impression of a less than complete package, because it is not. It just misses on one of my main requirements.
Oh, and it also let you tag the post with keywords. Easy as pie.
Tags: Qumana, blogging software, BlogDesk, zBlogWriter
Topics: Blogs, Technology |
May 4th, 2006 at 12:20 am
Setting the time for a post is on our list of improvements, and there’s a good chance it will be in our next release (but not an iron-clad promise). So, it may be that you will want to check back in a month or six weeks or so, and see where we are at … but of course you may have found nother by then that suits you perfectly.
But, we are dedicated to continuous improvement, and are aware that some users really want the functionality you have cited.
May 4th, 2006 at 9:30 am
Jon,
Thanks for your response to my review of Qumana blogging software. It is simple, elegant and works very well for what it does. Keep up the good work on this super product.