For more than a months now I have been trying to find the “right” offline blog editing tool. The problem is I work differently depending on where I am and what I am doing. Let me explain. Initially, I wanted a tool that allowed me to quickly create and post blog entries. Since I work on a Mac, the tool needed to integrate with iLife (specifically: iPhoto, iMovie and occasionally Garageband). Support for YouTube and Flickr would be a definite plus. After doing some initial research I stopped myself and decided to approach the problem they way I would for any client.
Once I put on my consulting hat and thought not so much the “what” but the “where” I realized that I do most of my blogging (more than 50% of the time) when I am on the road (e.g., airport, cab, train, etc.). It is not that I don’t have interesting things to write about when I am at home or in the office. It is that the time I am waiting in a queue allows me to start thinking through some of the ideas I have pushed to the back of my head during the normal work day. It appears I can be very productive when I am waiting in line to be strip-searched by airport security or preparing for my flight to take off before I am abused by a flight attendant for not stowing my electronic devices. The device that is usually most handy is my Blackberry and my iPhone. Both which have decent inputing capabilities. Hmmm .. now what?
Since I almost always have my trusty MacBook Pro with me I decided to take a step back and first try Ecto and MarsEdit. I chose these tools based on friends recommendation and comments from other bloggers. Both tools worked well. They both allowed me to easily create a posts off-line but I wasn’t always happy with the final post as it appeared online in my blog. Often the font was not what I specified in my CSS file, the page breaks didn’t appear in the right place or the image alignment was off. If I used the tool to go back and edit my post, the updates appeared as new posts vs updates. I consistently found myself editing the posts directly using Wordpress via a browser (Ugh!).
Now to be honest, I am not 100% sure if the the presentation/formating issues are due to the software, or some issue with WordPress itself. No judgements, No judgements! But that is really not my point. My point is that I was not able to use just one tool to post and manage my blog. Perhaps it is just not realistic to use just “one” tool.
Now I am sure some of you are saying, “hey doofus, you can submit e-mails to your blog and have them post automatically.” That’s true. Unfortunately, my hosting provider GoDaddy has some really great ISP security constraints that have, to date, prevented me from successfully activating the mail-to-blog functionality built into Wordpress. While I am satisfied with them as a hosting provider ($7.95/month with ridiculously large storage and bandwidth ain’t bad), I have been able find someone at GoDaddy who can help me work through the email agent issues. And believe me it is not due to a lack of trying.
So for now … the search will continue. I have just downloaded the latest versions of Ecto and MarsEdit and will put them through their paces. I am using MarsEdit to write this post so I’ll keep you informed on how it is working. When I am on the road, I simply type up my post as an email and send it to my personal email account where it sits until I have a change to post it to my blog.
If you have any ideas, thoughts or useful comments on the process or tools you use to manage your blog. I’d love to hear about them. Please post your comments below.
