10 Desktop Blog Post Publishing Apps Reviewed (Windows)

All of the popular blogging platforms offer a simple to use and feature packed blog posting editor, many of which now rival their long-standing desktop based word-processing counterparts. Some of these editors are based upon the TinyMCE JavaScript library that provides word processing capability that is supported by all four major browsers. However, depending on an author’s research habit, a browser may end up spreading both memory and processing power amongst dozens of open tabs, and lessening the responsiveness of an already over-worked JavaScript text editor and that’s just one of the factors that could influence the move to a non web-based blog editor.

While some could say such a dramatic change in the way a blog is maintained could destroy an authors rhythm, there’s nothing wrong with ditching any inbuilt editor that is slow and buggy for something that has the potential to increase your productivity. In fact we decided to starting posting from the desktop right away on our brand new blog, and over the course of a week we installed and tested over 25 apps of various ability – some of them were free, and some of them just plain didn’t work. We removed the ones that didn’t cut it and offer you our choices for the ten best Windows based blogging editors.

Pros:

• Extensive editing – use hundreds of Office features to post on your blog.
• Very simple XMLRPC transfer to WordPress
• Inline grammar and spell-checking

Cons:

• Expensive (but has two-month free trial)
• Installs extras such as Groove.
• Learning curve from Office 2003s UI to 2007′s ribbon interface.

Microsoft Office 2007 offers a robust interface that combines all of Word’s famous features into one incredibly useful blog publishing desktop app. With literally hundreds of visual formatting options, possibly the most useful feature includes the ability of embedding charts and diagrams with Office 2007’s SmartArt, choosing from over one-hundred different variations, including matrices, relationship patterns and pie charts.

Pros:

• Increased API support for WordPress and SharePoint.
• Video support – upload from YouTube, MSN and others.
• Extensive plug-in support with hundreds of available third-party add-ons.

Cons:

• No support for WordPress “custom fields”
• Some blog themes don’t download and display correctly.
• Limited support.

Live Writer was initially released as a stand-alone product, but has recently been embedded into the Windows Live set of apps, available from Microsoft. Live Writer is a very polished offering, and is currently the only app on our list that includes a plug-in system  with hundreds of third-party developers.

Great as an all-around blog publishing tool, Live Writer also caters to the photoblog community by allowing photo manipulation functionality through a set of treatment filters. These include the base cropping and resizing, along with more advanced techniques like drop shadows and tilting. Or if you’re really slick, you can simply create an entire photo album and let Live Writer stack and sort your photos. Included support for LightBox and inline image preview, as well as plug-ins for social sites such as Digg, Flickr and Twitter.

Pros:

• Publish to multiple blogs in one click.
• Easy image upload and manipulation.
• Automatic upload of local files just by linking to them.

Cons:

• Old Windows 2000 style interface.
• Only updated twice since Summer of 2007.
• Minor issues while running on Microsoft Vista.

BlogDesk is one of the older offline blog publishing apps, version 1.0 being released in September 2005, and while the app saw major updates during the first two years, BlogDesk has only been updated twice since April of 2008. However, BlogDesk does offer enough core functionality to overcome the lack of updates, and its use of Wizard-style interfaces can boost your productivity by automatically setting up posts through templates and simple macros (such as automatically uploading a local file simply by linking to it in a post draft.)

While many of the apps in our list offer the same features, BlogDesk won us over by letting us modify WordPress custom fields. We use custom fields to attribute thumbnails and front-page excerpts for each post, and none of the other clients even acknowledged this feature. BlogDesk also allows authors to pull and edit posts directly from your blog, and offers handy notebook storage and a contextual tag generator.

Pros:

• Tabbed editor interface.
• Post to multiple blogs.
• Install as a portable application.

Cons:

• Older interface makes app seem outdated.
• Developers have given up on updating it.
• Limited support.

ZoundryRaven is an open-source blog publishing app in need of a good coder or two to pick up on futher development. Overall, ZoundryRaven offers almost everything that the other apps include, but unlike the others, you have access to the source code and thus can fix bugs and add new features should you be so inclined.

ZoundryRaven supports media uploading to a host of different sites, including Picasa and ImageShack, and allows blog owners to maintain and search through all of their posts by indexing tags, links and image data. The major competitive edge is ZoundryRaven’s tabbed interface, which allows for WYSIWYG and XHTML source editing, along with simple drag and drop awareness of images, text and videos from the web.

Pros:

• Template editing.
• Full UTF-8.
• Portable version for use on a flash drive.

Cons:

• Last updated in December of 2007.
• New blog platform APIs are not supported.
• Limited support.

w.bloggar is a very outdated, but Lockergnome recommended Windows based app, that covers all of the things you’d expect, but it’s lack of developer support leaves out many of the new API capabilities introduced with new platform releases such as WordPress 2.8. Authors who are just looking for a bare-bones publishing app will find that the free w.bloggar fits the bill just fine, while anyone looked for more advanced options might want to stick with Live Writer.

Pros:

• Template editing.
• Full UTF-8.
• Portable version for use on a flash drive.

Cons:

• Couldn’t get it to run, even after 3 reboots.
• Took a lot of memory when testing it (over 80MB).
• Written in Java.

Pros:

• Modern user interface and API support.
• YouTube, Flickr and Image embedding.
• Browser integration allowing easy blogging in seconds.

Cons:

• Expensive.
• Took a lot of memory when testing it (over 80MB).
• Written in Java.

BlogJet is a major player in the offline blog publishing space, with honorable mentions in over a dozen books and a magnitude of favorable online press all praising this Windows app as the king of the crop. However, we can’t really vouch for that, since BlogJet shares many of the same feature set as LiveWriter but its price starts at $39.95 for the low end version.

Price aside, BlogJet could end up well worth it for any author looking for a fully-featured blogging tool while on the road or just when hopping coffee shops. It’s post management tool caches all of your posts offline, and allows you to search, open and edit any post through a variety of query possibilities. Blogs with multiple authors, or authors with multiple blogs will favor BlogJet for its ability to manage many sites at once, even if they are using different blogging frameworks.

Pros:

• Post images to Flickr or using your blogs API.
• Portable mode.
• Hot-key support.

Cons:

• No technical support.
• Outdated and clunky interface.
• Doesn’t support the latest WordPress API.

There isn’t much information on Post2Blog, and all we could find on their website was a large text block explaining that the freeware download came with no tech support. In the end, that works out because Post2Blog is easy to figure out and use, and is completely free.

While similar to the other blog editors we’ve reviewed, Post2Blog lets you easily embed advertising in the form of Amazon links, as well as widgets and tags from sites such as Technorati, Delicious and 43 things.

Pros:

• Support for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Visual Editor with tagging support.
• Works well with Blogger.com.

Cons:

• Official site has the default WordPress theme.
• Last update was summer of 2007.
• Doesn’t support the latest WordPress API.

Bleezer is an older app, and as such we didn’t expect much from it. In fact, since Bleezer’s last update was in summer of 2007, it’s impossible to compare it with newer apps like LiveWriter. However, it’s a free app, and can do what it advertises – and that is providing a visual, wysiwyg interface with all the normal features you’d expect.

Authors who choose Blogger.com over WordPress or TypePad may find Bleezer more suitable, as there were quite a few code updates (during active development) to accommodate the new Blogger API.

The top four major browsers now all have some sort of plug-in or dedicated tool that allows you to quickly blog about your online experience, but Flock was one of the first to implement it. It’s nothing to blog home about (ahem) but Flocks blog posting interface does get the job done, and lets you do simple word processing from within a browser.

Pros:

• Lets you upload images and links.
• Quick and easy to use.

Cons:

• Limited visual editing.
• Just a side-product of the Flock browser.
• Doesn’t support multiple API features.