Wednesday 18 February 2015

Linux replacements for Windows Live Writer ... (not)

When I upgraded to Xubuntu, one of the downsides was that I lost the use of Windows Live writer, a free and nifty offline blogging client from Microsoft that plays nicely with both blogger and wordpress.

Given that my xubuntu machine is used while travelling, offline capability is useful as it lets me blog in these moments while waiting for something to happen, or while travelling on a train or plane.

Now the real usefulness is that once you get to somewhere with internet you can simply click on ‘Publish’ and it’s published.

The obvious workaround of writing the draft post in an editor and cutting and pasting it into a blog window on the web isn’t quite so slick, especially if you have links or some complex formatting like a table.

Yes it can be done, but it can be a little more time consuming.

So this lunchtime I did a bit of googling, and there’s certainly clients out there such as Drivel and Blogilo but they have a set of problems - basically there’s not been a lot of development of these applications in recent years, which means that they havn’t kept up with api changes for example QTM looks promising, but actually can’t post to a recent Wordpress install.

In fact I had a happy hour building and testing those that looked promising, and basically none of them really did the job.

All very frustrating, but basically it means writing the text in an editor of your choice (and exporting the file as html if there’s any complexity involved) and pasting into blog site ...

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