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May 21, 2003

Blogging Tools

Dave writes,

Scoble, who works at Microsoft now,...
Scoble, who works at Microsoft now, says he likes using a desktop app to write his internal weblog. Right on. I've been using a desktop app to write Scripting News for years. The browser is not a great writing tool. Ironically, MS is the best company to solve that problem. They don't want to do it, clearly. [Scripting News]

I've got to agree that I like using a desktop app too. I've been using Kung-Log for the last month or so and I now hate going to the Movable Type entry page to make a post. Now, Kung-Log is a bit more for the person who knows some HTML, it has some support for putting in tags, but for me it's usually easier to just add them in while typing. The one exception is URLs, which it handles in a very cool way (you hilite the text for the link and when you choose the url option it creates the link puts what's in the clipboard as the destination for the link).

The thing is I'm still undecided as to the place of the browser in making entries. Having used the three big blogging systems, all of which have a web interface by default, I think it's fine for the basics. But it really bites for anything beyond that. Kung-Log gives me a lot of options. Like being able to save a draft of a post if I'm not ready to post it right away. The only thing I might want is some kind of WYSIWYG editing mode, but that really isn't a priority.

Oh yeah, and I'm on a Mac, so I'm not sure that MS is the company to solve the issue of the browser not being a great writing tool. Actually, Safari has one thing that did make the whole blog entry editing thing easier. In TEXTAREA fields you can use emacs navigation keys, even things like ctrl-k and ctrl-y. If you could combine that with something like htmlArea you might have something pretty cool. For now though, Kung-Log is where it is at for me.

Posted by snooze at May 21, 2003 7:06 AM