yowkee essential

I am searching for a blog application running under Windows, allow me to post to my weblog without going to the web. Yeah, the web interface provide the portability and it's good I could use it anywhere as long as Internet is accessible. But we lazy people just always like to use the some little rich-interface tools of the environment. From MT's manual of describing using XML-RPC implementation with existing tools, I got these options:

• w.bloggar
• BlogApp
• BlogLet
• BlogBuddy
• Jericho

BlogApp is only for Mac OS X and BlogLet is a service for provide subscription of your blog via email, so these two are out of options (My home PC running WinXP so I got to use something run on Win32). The experience with the rest is as following:

BlogBuddy
Installation of BlogBuddy is easy: download the archive, unpack and point it to where you want to install. When you first running it, you'd get the following screen:

The interface is pretty obvious, go to Tools->Options, set your MT username/password. Then go to "Remote site" tab, type in your host at Host name, and input the location of your mt-xmlrpc.cgi at Endpoint. It is done, next to go to "Blogs" tab, click the "Update Blogs" button and you get blog information loaded. You could start to add new post or getting existing post for editing. (You would need to set the proxy setting if your Internet access have to go through proxy)

BlogBuddy has a simple and easy-to-use interface. But there is no option to specify the category of post. It didn't offer much help on HTML syntax except adding link and formatting your text to bold/italic/underline.

w.bloggar
w.bloggar is a freeware blog tool supports Blogger, b2, MovableType, Nucleus, BigBlogTool, BlogWorks XML, Blogalia and Drupal blogs. Indeed, most of these systems implement Blogger API (MovableType implements Blogger and metaWeblog XML-RPC API). It seem Blogger API has been de facto standard of blog XML-RPC API.

w.bloggar give users a standard Windows setup program to install it, and it come with a default English spell checker. BlogBuddy is using The Stuffed Dog's service to provide spell checking. The first running of w.bloggar would ask you to setup your blog account:

Then the setup screen pop-up for you to input the key information. It has a pretty clear instruction for MT users. Select "MovableType" from Blog Tools, give your blog an alias name. Just follow the sample given in the config box, set your host and location of mt-xmlrpc.cgi. As BlogBuddy, it is done after you set the key information (your username/password, hostname, xml-rpc cgi). You could start enjoying remote posting/editing your blog!

Jericho
At the time when I download Jericho, there is only source code provided and you need Ant to build it. I download Ant, install it, then type "ant gui" at the place where I unpack Jericho to. It start building Jericho and bring up Jericho GUI after build has been done.

At first, you have to choose a service, the option is either Blogger or Manila. Select Blogger, then input your username/password on login screen, put the Server to "other" (else it would point to the default blogger.com server). The next screen you are required to input the full path of your mt-xmlrpc.cgi (e.g. http://www.yourserver.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi if your mt-xmlrpc.cgi is put under /mt). Again, once these key information given, it's done and the blog roll. :)

I am sure there are more tools out there could achieve the same thing I needed for my MT blog. But I guess it's enough by just taking look on these 3 blogging client. Jericho is running reasonably in my PC, though its interface is a bit too plain. BlogBuddy is nice but I need the category feature. In other words, w.bloggar suit my need very well: it has category feature, with more functions supporting HTML syntax, and a nice-looking UI. At this time, w.bloggar is version 3.00.0139, BlogBuddy is version 0.5, Jericho also version 0.5. Checking the development log showing w.bloggar is more agressively developed.

In short, my choose go to w.bloggar!