Blog Off(line)

I know I’m old-fashioned, but I still like to edit my blogs from a client, not from the webpage itself. It’s probably something to do with the temperamental connections I get in this neck of the woods, but I’m always convinced my ramblings are going to disappear into the ether unless they’re somehow being saved on my computer,  not on someone else’s. What’s more, I hate the fact that Control+k doesn’t always mean insert a hyperlink. It should in every language, every situation. Really.

So it’s simple. A blogging tool (or client, if you want to be fancy) simply allows you to create, edit and update your blog postings without being online. You can fiddle with them, hone them, just as I’m not doing with this one, until you get a decent connection, and then you press the button and thwang, your post is posted. No openings of browsers; no waiting for connections before the muse strikes. Thwang. I love ’em.

Problem  is, there aren’t many of them and I’ve not seen a decent list of them in one place. So, I’ve updated my 2.5 year old directory of blogging software to fill this hole in the market, and even thrown in a Mac client or two too, to keep my friend Mark happy. What I didn’t do was to include any Linux ones; I know they exist but I couldn’t find one I liked last time. I’m sure I’ll hear from Ubuntu folks soon enough. Oh, and Microsoft Word 2007 has a built-in tool now; see this post and the comments for a perspective on this.

But I do tend to agree with the somewhat irritable sounding commenter called HolidayCornwall who complained back in December 2005 about the absence of ‘software which can organise my blogs posting schedule which are mostly related to english language’. Of course, I was too gallant to suggest they first focus on mastering the English language before they start looking for complex blogging clients. Besides, the link they posted from, Littlewood Farm in Bodmin, looks so inviting all feelings of being a churl are banished. (Can a churl be banished? What is churl, exactly? Apparently, according to the American Heritage dictionary, it’s a boorish, rude person, or, alternatively, a mediaeval English peasant. Or both, I suppose. Excellent; they didn’t mess about with their insults in those days. “Churl, bring me some more toner and two copies of Windows XP SP2. And stop looking so dang churlish. Honestly”)

Anyway, I seem to have gotten off track here. I was talking about blogging tools. Oh, and the lack of a really decent blog organizer. I would love to have one that kept all my postings in an offline database, that I could update when the feeling arose. Is there something like that, or am just Bodmin? (You’ll either have to live in Cornwall or watched Doc Martin to get that.)