A very cool online Flash "game" created by American Public Media, Consumer Consequences, takes you through the various areas of life which affect the environment: your home; the energy you use in your home; the waste you generate at home; transportation; food; and shopping and at the end you can see how your lifestyle affects the earth, in terms of the number of "Earth's" that would be required to allow all 6.6 billion people to live just like you do. Very interesting. Here is my final score:

So, here is another desktop blogging tool I am testing. Let’s see how it stacks up.

Account Setup

To use with BlogEngine.Net, you need to choose "MetaWeblog API" and I had a bit of trouble because it asks you to point to a file called XML-RPC:

Setting up Post2Blog for use with BlogEngine.net

And worse, suggests that it will be in a php file. So, if you put in a link to "metaweblog.axd" as is suggested by the BlogEngine.Net documentation, you will most likely get an error (at least I did). Here is how to get around that - put in "rsd.axd" instead. This should allow you to finish the New Account Wizard. Of course, then you will possibly get another error when you actually try to connect to your blog (to "Update Blogs and Categories", for instance) so this is where you Edit your profile and change it to "metaweblog.axd." At least these gymnastics worked for me.

Post Editor

The main workspace is a full-featured WYSIWYG editor, with the ability to switch over to HTML view as well. (Unfortunately it doesn’t jump to the current area in the HTML file when you switch over.) It includes all the goodies you’d expect and works well. Keep in mind, though, that as with most WYSIWYGs, the generated HTML can get unwieldy with extra tags and things like unexpected font tags, etc. There isn’t any CSS integration, so you can’t easily assign your own classes. Also, there isn’t any syntax highlighting or formatting in the HTML view.

Images

A very convenient feature (especially for people grabbing screenshots or pieces of larger images) is the ability to just copy & paste images into a post. When you click in your post and Paste, you get the image properties dialog box:

Image Properties Dialog

Which allows you some nifty options like automatically converting the image to a web-friendly type, assigning a caption, creating a linked thumbnail, and adding a (sort of ugly) drop-shadow. Some caveats - in order to have the caption show the way it does, tables are drawn around images along with some extra font tags, etc.:

Spell Checking

Inline automatic spell-checking (like in MS Word) is a great feature for those who like it (and can easily be turned off for those who don’t), and you can also set an option to run the spell checker before you publish your post.

Posting

I encountered some problems while posting, which might be due to some of the more crazy HTML, or maybe the problem with categories, or who knows what... It deleted the post title, which I had to restore in BlogEngine.Net. 

Working Offline

There is a nice interface to view & select the current posts:

But when opening posts, it seems that the images were all broken - they were pointing to local temp files rather than the published online images, which I think would be more correct, especially once a post has been published. There is an option under the Tools menue to "Download all images as local images", but clicking that didn't seem to do anything to fix the issue. 

Blog Options

Post2Blog didn’t read my Categories correctly - it shows the descriptions rather than the category names (which also means that any categories which don’t have a descriptions are totally missing). I’m not sure if this is an error with the program, or with the implementation of MetaWeblog that BlogEngine.Net uses...

I didn't see anywhere that Tags (aka keywords) could be assigned to a post.

Interesting Features

"Portable Version" allows you to create a version with all your settings that can be run from USB flash drives etc.

Firefox & Internet Explorer Add-ins for fast blogging from webpages.

"Quick  Snippets" allow you to define chunks of text/HTML which can be quickly inserted, and you can setup abbreviated text which when typed will be automatically replaced with the defined text/HTML. This is a good way to add support for additional HTML tags, or speed up the inserting of common stuff (for instance, a link to your company website whenever you mention your company).

Integration with popular online services includes special support for Flickr photos, Amazon, Adsense,Chitika eMinimall, and Tagging Services (Technorati, Del.icio.us, Buzzwords, 43 Things, etc)

Colored Syntax highlighting for various programming & markup languages. Just select some text and choose Insert > Highlighted Code... You can choose the language and font:

Keep in mind that the code isn't perfect - see my syntax highlighted HTML, above (also, I added the tabs & line breaks - it doesn't preserve them when you paste the code in)

Insert > Current Music exists, but when I attempted to use it, it insisted on opening iTunes, even though I already had Windows Media Player running, so I guess it only works with iTunes. 

Final Opinion

Generally there is a lot to reccommend this software, but it's implementation in relation to BlogEngine.Net isn't that great. There are some very basic things that hinder using it, specifically, how it handles images and categories and its lack of support for Tags/Keywords. Since this used to be a fully-supported paid product and is now in the unsupported freeware category, I have some concerns that it won't soon be updated or enhanced.

How to Get It

Name: Post2Blog [Bytescout]
Platform: Windows
Version Reviewed: v. 3.01
Price: FREE
Website: http://post2blog.com

w.bloggar is a desktop blogging tool. Since I am looking for ways to make blogging easier and more fun, this is a test post & review.

Account Setup

This is one of the very few blogging tools which specifically has support for BlogEngine.Net blogs, which can be chosen as the blog service when setting up the account. It worked flawlessly.

Post Editor

The main workspace is a HTML editor. The toolbar has the standard HTML markers (Bold, Italic, Underline, Strike-through), though unlike a WYSIWYG editor, it doesn't show the formatting, it adds in the HTML code, which won't be a big deal to HTML proficient people, but will throw off those who aren't. Of course, you can switch over to the Preview tab at any time.
w.bloggar - Editor

w.bloggar - Preview

Images

Unlike WLW, you can't just copy & paste a picture into a post. You need to save it with a filename, and upload it (though the upload box has the option to automatically insert either an IMG tag or a download (A HREF tag) link for the file you are uploading. However, since you are working in an HTML editor, you cannot drag to resize images, and instead need to manually calculate the correct width/height ratio and input it into the IMG tag. Also, if you want a smaller image in your post which links to the full-sized version, you need to manually add the link for that.

Spell Checking

The Spell checking feature is adequate, though it picks up some HTML tags and special characters:

 

and doesn't always suggest the best default change option:

 

Posting

Post & Publish worked quickly and smoothly, though I personally would rather that w.bloggar would leave the post open (since I might want to make changes again). Instead it automatically clears it out of the workspace and opens a new blank post. You can get it back by choosing "Last Post" from the Posts drop-down:

 If you choose one of the other options (Last 5, Last 10, etc.) a box listing the posts pops up so you can select the post you want to edit:

 

Although listing the posts by ID rather than title or even date is not the most usable. (There is also an option to get a post by typing in its ID, which, for Blog systems using a GUID (such as BlogEngine.Net), isn't as useable either.

Working Offline 

w.bloggar doesn't automatically save posts on your harddrive (which can be a good thing if you don't want to clutter up your computer). If you want to keep an offline copy of your post, you can save it to a .post file, which can then be opened in w.bloggar later. Generally this functionality will meet your offline working needs. 

Blog Options

w.bloggar handles Categories beautifully, even providing a "Reload" option to refresh the categories list if you added additional categories from inside your web-based blog interface while the program is open. It supports assigning multiple Categories to posts.

Tags (in w.bloggar the field is called "Keywords") are also handled nicely. There is a textbox for them on the "More" tab of the workspace. Just type them in separated by commas.

Interesting Features

Ability to create custom tags (which is a way to add in styles (div or span with class info) or html tags that aren't included (like PRE, CODE, H4, etc), though some might argue that all the basic HTML tags should already be available in the editor.

Ability to set properties (on a per-blog basis) for the Preview tab. You can make the preview more accurately match how your posts will look on your blog by setting refrences to your CSS or by adding style information directly.

Automatically add the music you are listening to. You can choose whether to add it automatically to all posts, or manually by clicking a button.

Here is an example:

 

Final Opinion

This could be a fantastic tool if it had a proper WYSIWYG editor. Unless you are an HTML purist, it seems to me that it's easier to use the web-based BlogEngine.Net WYSIWYG posting tool. However, it would be a decent tool to use in an offline-pinch.

How to Get It

Name: w.bloggar [Marcelo Lv Cabral]
Platform: Windows
Version Reviewed: v. 4.02
Price: FREE
Website: http://wbloggar.com/

I have now installed BlogEngine.Net on HeatherFloyd.com. I hope to consolidate all my blogging to this location and figure out a way to pull relevant posts out to my various other umbraco websites. We'll see how that goes...