Blog Desktop Clients

Blogging on My Mac with Windows 7 and Live Writer

Posted on January 20, 2010

Windows-7-parallels So I have taken to doing more blogging lately after a very long hiatus. As apart of my step back into blogging I did another search for desktop blogging applications that would work on the Mac as well as Windows Live Writer works on Windows. Unfortunately IMO there is still nothing that comes close.

My love for Windows Live Writer has pushed me to what may claim to be an extreme work around, but never the less, it is what works for me and I am happy.

What I have done is installed Windows 7 in Parallels and run WLW in it. My Macbook runs great with 1GB of its 4GBs of RAM allocated to Windows. It only begins to slow down if I happen to be running Parallels, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop at the same time (DM and PS are running in OS X). I usually do not have those open when wanting to blog though so I really do not run into trouble.

Some may ask what would push me to run a completely different operating system just to do the occasional blog post?

There are several reasons for this.

Desert The first would be that WLW actually downloads the images and CSS from your blog and you are typing your post in the exact format that you blog is in. This is really helpful when you are doing formatting items such as H tags and images. It truly is WISIWIG and it makes for faster posting of more attractive posts.

Jellyfish Speaking of images WLW has the best image editor of any other desktop blogging tool I have seem. All you do is drag and drop the image into your post. From there you can resize the image by grabbing a corner and dragging. Once you are done dragging the corner the image is resampled as opposed to just being resized. I have not seen any other blogging tool do this.

Lighthouse Also available are a whole bunch of effects you can give the images such as drop shadows, photo frames, and reflections. Along with that you can set custom margins for the images so that your text does not run into them. Finally you can set the images to link to pages, the original size of you image, or to nothing at all. It really does make incorporating images into your posts easy.

There are several other features that WLW has but the above mentioned ones are those that I use the most. They make it worth it to run Windows on my Mac ;-) .

WordPress iPhone App Version 1.1 Released – I Can’t Wait Until 1.2

Posted on August 4, 2008

WordPress has just released the 1.1 version of their iPhone Blogging application. This was mostly a bug and stability fix so their are no noticable feature updates or changes. They did reference the coming 1.2 version and provided a link to it from their announcement iphone.wordpress.net.

The 1.2 version virtually looks like my Don’t Like and Wish List combined together. It is supposed to include the ability to add links to posts, better image insertion, and password protection. This app already has gotten me blogging more but the addition of these items would make my life much easier.

Thanks WordPress team for awesome blogging software and an awesome software app!

WordPress iPhone Blogging App – 5 Posts and a Day Later

Posted on July 24, 2008

I know it gas only been a day (or so) since the WordPress iPhone blogging app has come out but I have already used it to do at least 5 posts on various blogs. As I speculated it is allowing me to blog more which I really have been struggling to do. The fact that I can blog from anywhere has caused me to try to utilize my down time more and I am actually trying to think of things to blog about now. Also, I do not feel restricted by the tiny keyboard and have actually typed some rather long posts (quite longer then long emails that I have done in the past).

With that there have been somethings that have surfaced on my like/dislike/wish lists in regards to the app. I will start with the likes first.
Read the rest of this entry »

Images are Working Properly Now

Posted on July 22, 2008

Another update here at the idano.net website is that I fixed the issue that I had with images being uploaded and displayed properly.

I did not have the “Full URL path to filed” set. It says that this an optional setting and it worked before but I guess it wanted it now.

Anyway here are some pics from my iPhone to make sure that it is working.

photo

photo

photo

WordPress Releases Blogging Client for the iPhone

Posted on July 22, 2008

Hot off the press – WordPress has released their blogging client for the iPhone. In fact I am typing this post on my iPhone right now.

I have been waiting for this since the iPhone 2.0 firmware release when Typepad released their blogging client. I downloaded it but never used it since I don’t have a Typad blog.

So far this seems to be working great. The add photo section works cool although it adds the photo to the bottom of the post. Preview is awesome since you get to see you post formated in your blogs theme.

I think with this app I am going to be blogging a whole lot more :-) .

P.S. I originally uploaded images from my iPhone to this post but it was not working. That was an issue with this blog not the app. Also, I have noticed with this post that this template is not very WordPress Gallery friendly – I realize that – i am looking for a new theme as we speak as I cannot stand this one anyway.

Posting a Photo from the iPhone

Posted on September 18, 2007

photo.jpg

Well I found out the hard way that WordPress does not support posting photos via their post by email function.

I did a little searching and found the Postie plugin that allows you to do so ( sorry I cannot provide a link – the iPhone doesn’t have a way to do so).
Anyway, this is cool because now I can blog from anywhere.
Now to go get it setup on my other blogs…
- This was sent via my iPhone, please excuse any typos.

Image Manager for WordPress 2.1+

Posted on April 11, 2007

Picture_2.pngAs you know I have been searching hign and low for a Desktop Blog Editor for Mac that works half way decent. I recently tried Ecto but was not impressed.

The biggest item that has been missing from all the Blog Editors is the ability to resize images easily within the post. So instead of looking for a desktop client that could do this I looked for an image manager for WordPress.

I found a great one.

The name is quite simple – ImageManager. ImageManger replaces the included imag upload feature that is included with WordPress. It gives you ability to upload and image which creating a thumbnail. It also allows you to resize the thumbnail and apply style to. When you are done manipulaing the image you just click OK an the code is automatically entered into you post.

The above image was added to this post with ease.

Next I am going to look to get the photo border added to my CSS file as you can add classes to the images also.

It looks as though I am back to using the online editor now.

Technorati: , , ,

Test Post from Adobe Contribute on Mac

Posted on April 2, 2007

I was recently editing a page in Dreamweaver 8 and discover a cool little function in it. The function allowed you to resize an image in the page and then resample so that the original image became the same size as the resized image. I thought to myself that this would be really cool when doing a blog post. Windows Live Writer does this but I am still on the hunt for a Mac equivalent.

Enter Adobe Contribute.

Adobe is in between versions right now and is supposed to be releasing the CS3 version in about a month. With a little digging I was able to download Contribute version 4 to try out. Another item to mention is that Contribute is expensive @ $150, especially when other desktop blog editors are free. I am trying it out because I am planning on upgrading to the CS3 web suite and Contribute is a part of it so in essence I would not paying for it (on it’s own anyway).

Read the rest of this entry »

Test Post From Qumana Bog Editor – Mac

Posted on March 29, 2007

My SonI had reviewed Qumana quite some time ago on Windows and wasn’t quite impressed because of some bugs that I experienced at the time. Since I have been jonesing for Windows Live Writer lately I thought that I would give Qumana a shot on the MacBook.

I have to say that the initial experience has been more of a positive one them I remember. Qumana downloaded quickly and after the unzip I dropped in my applications folder. From there opening Qumana prompted me to enter my blog info which automatically detected my WordPress blog and downloaded my most recent posts.

From there I started this post. The first thing I noticed was their "Posted by Quamana" message in the bottom right hand corner. A quick trip to the preferences window allowed me to remove that. While I was there I noticed a check box to check spelling inline – nice – I activated it.

Next, the image test – the best that I have come across so far for Mac. Qumana allowed me to browse to an image, resize it, upload, and apply spacing to it – all without having to go to the HTML source. Also, once you have done al of this if you do not like the size of the photo you can right click on it and edit all of the same items – double nice!

Great job Qumana!

I am totally stoked. I have now officially found a Blog Desktop Editor that works really well in Mac. I will have to retest it in Windows to see if it works as well there.

Tags: , , ,

« Older Entries