Blogging Tools for Programmers

What kind of tools do you use for blogging? I am writing this, and most of my posts, in Blogger's web interface. I have tried a few other tools, but none of them are very good. There are some basic things that I want out of a blogging tool:

0.) Obviously it has to work with Blogger.
1.) Rich formatting. If nothing else I need to be able to easily create links. Full WYSIWYG editing would be great though. Don't make me do manual HTML formatting, but please don't prevent me either.
2.) Image hosting integration. I would like to be able to take either images on my local computer or off the web to include in the blog.
3.) Blogger tags/labels. I have a small blog, with about 100-150 unique viewers daily (as measure by MyBlogLog, which seems reliable.) There may be more folks who use blog reading tools, too, who knows. A decent number of the views come from people doing Google searches for "blah". These searches often lead to blog posts that I have tagged as "blah." No tagging means less visibility, so forget that.
4.) Offline mode would be nice. Really the first three thing are handled pretty well by Blogger's native web interface. But it would be nice to able to compose a post while offline.
5.) OSX. I blog on my MacBook almost exclusively and I do not want to boot Parallels just to blog. Integration with OSX spellchecker is pretty much implied too.

Does that seem like so much? I don't think so, but yet I have not found an acceptable solution for this. Seems like most desktop apps are designed for WordPress, TypePad, and Movable Type. I have tried things that are supposed to be great, like Mars Edit, and was underwhelmed. So even though nothing quite satisfies the above simple requirements, what I would really like is something that also supported:

6.) Code. I like to include code in my posts. It would be great to have something that made it easy for me to copy-n-paste code. It should escape special characters for me (like greater than and less than signs), provide code highlighting based on the language, and provide scrolling. Right now I use a PHP highlighter from Gilly. I had to hack in the CSS for this in one of my sidebar widgets. It works ok, but is a bit manual and the code often overflows.

Is there a tool like this out theere and I just don't know it? Is there a tool out there that does all of this but only with one of the other blogging platforms? If that were true, I would have to figure out how much pain would be involved with migrating... Maybe I should just build this using AIR?

Flock 1.0

In case you missed the news, Flock finally went 1.0 late last month. I've been playing around with Flock for over a year. They're integration with social services has gotten better and better. I did a clean install of it and setup my Flickr, YouTube, and Blogger accounts very easily. I've given up on using it for RSS, as having a server-based solution (Google Reader) is too valuable to me. They've also added Facebook and Twitter integration, two favorite services of mine. Both are well done. And of course it's based off Firefox 2.0 now, which is great. Most Firefox plugins work great with it. I'm using its blog writer right now, as I'm planning on using it as my primary for a week or so and then figure out if I should go back to Firefox or not.

Blogged with Flock

Ecto-Mac

As promised, I'm giving Ecto a try on the Mac. It sure looks a lot different. The Windows look-and-feel was very Office-ish. The Mac version looks like ... Mac-like, but not really like any other Mac app. Setup was also challenging again. On the Windows version, I needed the unique GData URL to my blog (unique because it includes Blogger's internal ID for the my blog.) For the Mac version, I just needed the generic URL used to retrieve blog metadata for an authenticated user. It still required double authentication, just as the Windows version did. The insert iPhoto pic didn't work any better than the insert Flickr photo did on Windows. I'm clearly missing something. I'll use it a few times and see if it grows on me. The tagging is probably critical...

Update: The labels worked a little better. I got the little Technorati tags bit, just as Flock likes to put them. No Blogger labels, though, so this will probably not be a product I purchase.

Technorati Tags: ecto

Ecto

I was reading this article on great Mac products and the very first one mentioned is a blog editor called Ecto. I was using my work laptop (Windows) when I read it, but noticed there was a Windows version. I decided to give it a try.

It uses the .NET framework, so there is a noticeable lag when it starts up. Maybe that will go away on Vista. Setting up my Blogger account required me to manually fetch the ID of blog and enter my credentials twice. The latter is just annoying, the former is something that I can't imagine most people doing.

The interface is pretty nice. It loaded all my old posts rapidly and allowed me to edit them easily. It also has nice support for Blogger's tagging system, err labels. It has nice integration with Flickr, allowing me to view my photostream from inside Ecto though I could only seem to insert a picture as a link, not an actual image.

All in all a promising product. I'll try it a few more times. I think the Mac is its "native" environment, so it might be better on there. Don't know if it's worth $$, but it's really pretty cheap ($18.)

Update: Turns out Ecto screws up Blogger's tagging/labels. That's something that Flock doesn't handle well either. That's too bad. Some MyBlogLog analysis shows that I get a lot of traffic via Google search for "foo" -> "foo" label on my blog. Definitely no $18 for the Windows version in that case. I'll try the Mac version tonight.

Flocked Again

On a tip, I decided to try a developer build of Flock 0.8 (well 0.7.99 is what it says.) It has some very cool new features. The blog editor has some rich editing capabilities. Setting up accounts seems even easier than before. Just go to somewhere like Flickr and Flock simply asks you if it's ok for it to enable the service. Pretty seamless. The only exception I saw to this was with Blogger. It prompted me once when I went to the Blogger website, but then when I wanted to post, I was asked to setup the service again. Maybe that will be worked out for 0.8.

The RSS reader looks a lot nicer. There is integration with YouTube, which is very cool. It is running on the Firefox 2.0 code, so everything renders much quicker. Now if only there was a way to sync my RSS metadata between Flock on my work and home computers...

Blogged with Flock

Link Blog

I was playing around with some of the new Blogger features. I was pleased to see you could add different widgets to your blog. I was very interested in looking at the markup code they are using to capture this in your blog's template. I added a couple of widgets to my blog. Most interesting is probably the link blog. I added this by adding a "feed widget" to my blog, and giving it the RSS URL of my link blog from Google Reader. Now whenever I read an interesting article, I just hit "shift-S" and it shows up on my blog.

Blogging from Google Docs

I had heard about using Google Docs to blog. This seemed like it could be promising, since Google Docs has a little nicer interface than Blogger. Also, one had to figure the integration should work really well given that my blog is on Blogger -- which is also part of Google. I'm actually writing this blog using Google Docs (what used to be Writely.)

Setting up the integration wasn't quite smooth. I entered my blog as a Blogger(beta) (even though I thought it isn't a beta anymore...) and it told to optionally list the name of the blog. I put in "Programming and Politics." I hit the "test settings" button and it said everything worked. I then wrote a blog and published it to my blog. It was posted to the wrong blog: Mike's Photo Blog . I had misspelled the title "Programming and politics" so it instead defaulted to the first blog it found under my account: Mike's Photo Blog. Once I corrected the title, it posted to the right blog. It would have been nice if it would have told me I got the name wrong, or if it would have provided me a list of blogs to pick from (seems like that would be the best solution, and it show just be a simple AJAX call.)

Next issue was the title. Supposedly it would use the title of the document for the title of the blog if your blog "supported titles." Certainly my blog has titles to its document. I titled the blog, but it's title did not go through to the blog. So I had to re-edit it inside Blogger to give it the right title.

Next issue was tags. Blogger calls tags labels, but Google Docs calls them tags (like the rest of the world, and other Google apps.) It claimed that any tags for the document would become tags for the blog. Only problem was that there was no tagging option from either the edit doc or publish doc screen. It actually does exist from the "Active Documents & Spreadsheets" screen.

One other kind of frustrating thing is spell checking. One thing I really like about Firefox 2.0 is that it checks spelling for you automatically. When I want to fix the spelling, I just right click on the misspelled word. Only Google Docs takes over the contextual menu. So instead I have to use it's own spell checker. I can understand them taking over the contextual menu, but they should put spelling corrections as part of it. That's MS Word does, too, of course.