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Blogging Software - Part II - Zoundry’s Blog Writer
By Larry Hendrick | June 7, 2006
The time has come to write an extensive article about the second blogging software package that is still installed and used on my laptop, Zoundry’s Blog Writer. This software, like the others I have been reviewing is free of charge to use and provides a platform for offline writing and multiple blog management. This is the most feature rich blogging software I have trialled, yet is easy to use with all the normal buttons for formating and linking.
Blog Writer is easy to install using their executable download and clicking “next” a few times. One installed and started, a blog must be setup and configured. For this you need the blog name, URL, and the posting URI for the blog as well as the login and password information. As soon as you set up a blog, Blog Writer retrieves the categories from the site without help. It also downloads all the posts that are on the front page (from what I can tell) and allows for offline editing of posts that have already be published. It doesn’t change the publish date or time, but allows corrections to be handled with ease and then re-published.
One thing to keep in mind, though. The spell checker works great, but the dictionaries are not available with the initial download and installation. They must be downloaded and installed first, but the reason is the different languages that are supported. For me, the English dictionary was the choice and it downloaded and installed in a few minutes.
Once the blogs are configured, you are ready to get started. Opened, Blog Writer looks like any software writing package and is very intuitive. The icons and buttons are familiar to everyone that uses OpenOffice, Microsoft Word or Wordpad.
You can see from this screenshot the new, folder, save and undo arrows, as well as many other that are used every day. On the bottom are all the tools for formating the text. The feature set for this software is bigger than any others because it writes its own inline style sheet for control. Not only can you control the things that are found on other blogging tools, but this allows for additional formatting. Because an inline style sheet trumps a linked style sheet, font styles, and colors can be changed on a whim as easily as highlighting text and clicking a button. Just that easily and presto, chango, red, comic sans MS writing. I have not found this in other software packages. I know that font styles and colors, as well as font sizes need to be under control, but I really like the fact that I can bring attention to a word, sentence or paragraph with just a click of a button. And colors and large fonts do catch the attention of people cruising by your blog. They will stop and at least read the attention grabber, so make it pay off. That’s worth noting. In fact, I have been toying with an idea that I may implement, now that Blog Writer is in my arsenal.
The date and time are just as easy to configure. If you want a post to be available at 10:00 PM tomorrow evening, just set the date and time as you publish and that is when it will publish for public viewing. I have been a clock watcher on this fact, because I use future posting on a daily basis. If I sit down and write several articles in a row, I don’t want them showing up on the website within twenty or thirty minutes of each other, so I spread them out, but posting one at the current time, then posting the second one a few hours later and the rest, the next day. Flawless so far, is all I can say.
As you can see, inserting a picture is easy and the options once inserted are plenty. Drag and drop is supported as well as the insert button on the toolbar. It resizes and inserts the thumbnail, then makes the full size picture available from the website. The thumbnails can be adjusted or tweaked if you want it larger or smaller once it is inserted. It will upload the pictures using the regular upload feature, or it can be set to use ftp to a designated folder. As of this writing, I have been unable to get the ftp option working, but the standard upload has handled anything I have thrown at it.
The save feature, like others, uses the blog title for saving, which makes it easy and fast. I regularly save my articles when I am writing, and this keeps me from having to stop what I am doing and think about a name for a file. It’s just done, no extra thinking required, which is a good thing.
Another capability in Blog Writer is found with a few tabs. There is a tab set for Edit/Designer, which is where you write your post. Beside the designer tab is a XHTML tab that allows you to see the underlying code. The last tab is a preview tab to see what it will look like on the website. The last feature has some shortcoming because it doesn’t take into consideration the width of your blogs columns, displaying everything at whatever width you are working with at the time. It does download part of the Style Sheet to show the article with a header with the proper colors. It’s just weak for me, so I don’t use this.
Another thing Blog Writer does, that I have not had the opportunity to try, is linking to products for buy. I have yet to sign up for an account, but might try it for a future article explaining that feature at length. I really don’t know anything about it, but it looks like Zoundry is an affiliate of another company and with links they, and more importantly, you, can earn cash.
That’s about all I have for now, but will keep you informed if something changes. I do like this ability to change, just for change sake. That is what this week’s Motivation on the Run is about, Change.
Topics: Blogs, Technology |
May 13th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
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