I recently noted that I’d tested out BlogJet to some success. After using it for a few weeks, and seeing a reply from Alec Satin, who has an excellent blog on Project Management and being a generally pleasant human being, I wanted to post a couple updates.

BlogJet has worked well, though I find that I have to jump on the web and make edits occasionally after posting. It lacks a couple key elements that would make it a real times saver:

• No way to insert symbols—though this dash, which I use constantly, shows up automagically, and you can add auto-replace rules for some things.
• It occasionally inserts formatting using span tags over the entire post, overriding the blog’s default styles, which is oddly annoying and unnecessary.
• Tags don’t work. It has an option to use ‘native tags’ instead of technorati, but that never works. They always show up as links at the bottom of the post instead of actual tags in WordPress.

Blog Jet is nice in that I don’t have to visit the site, log in, and click on post. So generally, when I have an idea I want to jot down and develop later, I write it in BlogJet and save it as draft on the site.

But if I’m going to post all the way through, I don’t see a point, since I have to log into the site and edit the tags anyways : (  I’ve put in a request to BlogJet to fix this feature; hopefully they’ll have an ear for my feedback.

Argh, trying this program was a test in patience.

I downloaded the ScribeFire plugin for FireFox and tried it out. Everything about it is wrong, imo. Which is surprising considering the large following it has. I suppose of the free alternatives its, well, really the only one besides BlogDesk that looked up to par.

But ScribeFire proved buggy, hard to use, hard to understand, and poorly designed. And while it had keyboard shortcuts, they weren’t documented and I didn’t intend to spend hours figuring them out to forget them later.

Their search feature fails if I put an = sign into the search (such as searhing the html for class="bold") So I ended up moving this post over to BlogDesk to finish writing it, which went buggy.

So now I’m back to BlogJet, who will be getting my $29.95 for a licence and a bit of peace of mind.

I tried out BlogDesk today. I tried to use it to write a review of ScribeFire (coming next). It didn’t go so well.

The interface is decent, not great but not horrible. Keyboard shortcuts and decent formatting. Most of the standard blogging features. No search and replace; typical.

However, after a while the program “glitched” and I was unable to edit the content of a post anymore.

The focus, even when I clicked on my text, seemed to go somewhere random, like the category list. So BlogDesk gets the thumbs down.

I tested out BlogJet ($29.95/free trial) for posting to my blog from a desktop editor. Very sharp and polished so far. When I opened it, it suggested I send this post, though it had some really silly text for the content.

It did, however, have this spiffy quote:

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” – Albert Einstein

I’ll also be trying out BlogDesk over the next few days, which is freeware. But I have a suspicion it won’t live up to BlogJet’s polished UI and nice set of hotkeys…