Why Desktop Blogging Clients Rock
Way back in a past post , I wrote about my hesitation to implement features that wouldn’t be accessible via desktop blogging clients, which I find preferable to web-based editors.
Here are some of the benefits of a desktop blogging client:
It allows you to blog when you’re not online. This is actually much more worth then it sounds. When you’re online, tons of information are threatening to distract you. While this may give you new ideas for writing, it is usually a bad ally for turning those ideas into articles.
Smoother editing experience. You need quite some patience to wait for the browser to launch, your blog site to load, to log in, click your way through the blog admin area, to finally start writing. With a desktop blogging client, you just launch it and start writing. (In the past, there’s been some claim that blogging clients provide a richer editing experience, too. But with the rise of advanced web-based WYSIWYG editors, this no longer holds generally true.)
For the same reasons, a desktop bloggin client allows you to quickly capture ideas. Often, a great idea comes up while you are working on something entirely different. You don’t want that fresh idea to be gone by the time you can start typing it in. Neither you want your original mental flow totally disruppted meanwhile . The launch time of a tool is important – especially for creative people.
Publishing on multiple blogs. Most blogging clients support publishing to several blogs, and many of them allow you to post to several blogs in parallel.
Keeping local backups. The blogging client will allow you to save a local copy of your articles. In consequence, this enables:
Easier blog transition. If for some reason you decide to move your blog somewhere else (and I’m not talking about going to another host only, but changing the blog platform altogether – like moving from wordpress.com to blogger.com, or vice versa), you can just add the new account to you blogging client, and republish your articles from your local copies.
One drawback I see with these tools is that you cannot access the specific features of your blogging platform, or features provided by plug-ins to that platform. (Personally there’s just one feature I really miss, and that’s my Insights search1. But I use it for illustration / typesetting purposes only, and that’s the last step I do anyway, so…)
In the past, spell checking has been listed as one of the advantages of desktop blogging clients. This is no longer true, because IMO the browser-based spell-checking feature beats most other spell-checkers on this planet. At least I get that impression with Firefox.
I’ll refrain from presenting a list of desktop blogging clients here. There is one here, and here, and another one is here .
I tried a lot of them and settled on BlogDesk as my personal favorite. It’s the one with probably the least features, but the features it has are all provided in the right way. 
It also is the one with the simplest and cleanest user interface. To me, it is the one with the smoothest operation and the least friction of all. And not to forget, it’s free.
At some later time, I’ll post about my blogging process.
So stay tuned, live long, and prosper.
- which I finally managed to get working here – but that’s another story [↩]
SmartXBlog is desktop blog editor for both windows and mac , it has WYSIWYG editor, image editor, online news, image and video search, drag and drop option, bookmarks , rss feed available from nearly 100 popular websites and you can even add your own rss, pop up alerts of your comments and you can preview and publish your post directly to your wordpress account .I think it is best available blogging desktop editor for windows and mac. Free trial can be downloaded from
http://www.smartxblog.com/
I have been using blogdesk for past four months and I would say it is fantastic tool.
It has been certified by BlogDesk support that
Unfortunately BlogDesk does not support chinese (or any other
non-latin) character set.
I spent 2 more hours on BlogDesk today … it works OK with posts written in English, BUT Chinese :<. I sent message to support of blogdesk anyway …. as below:
Hi,
I tested blogdesk with a NEW blog (WordPress v2.7.1) installed on my personal server.
The blogdesk works OK with the new blog, I can upload and get ENGLISH post with the new blog by blogdesk.
BUT, I failed when my post is written in Chinese (UTF-8), the error message was
An error occured while uploading the post. Error transfering the post to the server. Errorcode: -32700
parse error. not well formed
Appreciated if you can help me to resolved this problem, as I like the GUI of blogdesk very much.
Another error message with a blog which contains Chinese UTF-8 category
Error reading posts from server.
XML Parsing Error: Expecting ” found ” at character 843
The errors messages of getting published posts was:
Error reading posts from server.
XML Parsing Error: Expecting
‘< /namassword ‘ found ” at character 21483
Patrick, many thanks for the detailed feedback. It’s a pity BlogDesk doesn’t support non-latin character sets. Unfortunately, it’s not open-source (but closed source freeware), so there’s little hope someone else could speed things up on that side.
Some alternatives are:
– Zoundry Raven: I’ve tried it myself, and it seemed not bad at all. I think you can post to multiple blogs with this one, too. But it’s MUCH more heavyweight.
– Qumana: Should be similar to Raven, but it never worked on my PC, so I can’t really tell.
– Windows Live Writer: This is a typical Micorsoft application. Packed with features, but not the real ones (like multi-posting). After they switched to a web-only installer, I gave up checking out.
Another Error with a blog which contains Chinese category names
Error reading posts from server.
XML Parsing Error: Expecting ” found ” at character 843
Thanks for your concern!
I have activeated the XML-RPC checkbox, however,
the blog-ID and FTP upload function are tested OK when setup a BLOG account.
The errors messages of getting published posts was:
Error reading posts from server.
XML Parsing Error: Expecting
‘</namassword’ found
” at character 21483
The errors messages of uploading posts was:
An error occured while uploading the post. Error transfering the post to the server. Errorcode: -32700
parse error. not well formed
I have spent nearly two hours with BlogDesk, but still got no luck in uploading a post to my server on Internet or WAMPserver on my PC … :<
Patrick, it’s just a gues, but… You have to enable XML-RPC publishing on your blog first. Go to Settings->Writing, scroll down to the section “Remote Publishing”, and tick the “XML-RPC” checkbox, then try again.