Post To Your Blog With W.Bloggar
w.bloggar is a free blogging client program for writing blog articles offline. It offers an alternative to Windows Live Writer and those of you that are HTML purists may prefer it to Live Writer. It also has an official portable version, for those of you that carry your life on a USB stick.
Of course the first thing you will probably notice it is lacking is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing mode. I told you it was for HTML purists! It does offer a preview mode, but it is view-only. If you consider a visual editor to be a must-have, then w.bloggar may not be for you.
w.bloggar does offer HTML syntax highlighting, which is something that Windows Live Writer does not have.
Uploading/Inserting images is easy and it all happens in just two clicks. You just click the upload file button
and then select whether you want to post an image or a link to download the file being uploaded. You can also edit the tag options before inserting the HTML.
The fact that it uploads images directly to the blog as you are writing the post makes it much easier to work with the HTML. It also speeds up the final article posting, since the images are already on the blog.
w.bloggar supports many more web services and blogging platforms than Live Writer. Here is a list of the web services supported:
- Blogger
- MSN Spaces
- TypePad
- BigBlogTool
- Blogalia
- TheBlog
- Blog-City
- EraBlog.NET
- Upsaid
- UBlog
- SquareSpace
- BlogWare
- DearDiary.Net
As well as a number of different blogging platforms and content management systems:
- MovableType
- Nucleus
- b2
- WordPress
- b2 evolution
- Blog:CMS
- .Text
- BlogWorks XML
- Drupal
- LiveJournal
- pMachine
- Xoops
- E-Xoops
- PostNuke
- blojsom
- Roller Weblogger
- Domino
- YACS
- Xaraya
Given the comprehensive list, the chances are quite good that your blogging platform is supported. w.bloggar is a very small app, so it loads very fast and is ideal for using on portable drives. It is very easy to use, and will integrate very well and quickly with your blog. If you prefer to work with HTML directly when writing for your blog, you’ll definitely want to take a look at it.
What do you think of w.bloggar? Are you aware of any other good portable blogging tool we should know about?
(By) Jorge Sierra is a geek of all trades. Be sure to check out his blog, GeekLad
Blogdesk is a lightweight alternative to Live Writer and supports WYSIWYG. For portable blogging, Zoundry Raven is worth a try.
FYI – Zoundry Raven has recently gone open-source. So in case you are into that sort of thing, go here:
http://code.google.com/p/zoundryraven
We’re looking for a Few Good Developers (TM) to help improve Raven and drive it forward to new heights.
Hey
You got me excited when you mentioned something that could replace Live Writer. I recently moved to mac from windows. I’ve been looking for a blog writer/editor, any suggestions?
@use it
I’ll check it out, thanks!
-Mig
I’m not aware of any good free alternatives for the Mac, but there are a few pay programs that appear to be pretty good.
http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/
http://www.drinkbrainjuice.com/blogo
http://illuminex.com/ecto/
What about Linux? Is there a good alternative to WLW for Linux platform?
Very good question. I don’t really know of a good alternative for Linux either, but you could try running w.bloggar with Wine. You could also run a Windows instance under VirtualBox, and use WLW that way.
Jorge
thanks bro, yeah.. I’ve checked these three out already. I still need time to feel them out. Right about now, Windows Live Writer is still looking ahead of the pack.
Thanks,
-Mig