Blog Clients for Linux Stink

I envyed envied Ecto on Macintosh and similar solutions on XP (And I guess now Vista.). I wanted a WYSIWYG blog client in Linux. I’ve tried out Drivel, gnome-blog, KBlogger and BloGTK (Which I think is the best of the cited lot.) but not one of them has a WYSIWYG editor. The closest I came was a Firefox extension given the ugly name of Performancing. I’m using that extension now to knock out this entry here on the site.

Performancing has a few things going for it:

  • It’s built right into the browser and it’s lean.
  • It’s WYSIWYG, though not an especially robust form of WYSIWYG.

But it also has several drawbacks:

  • The markup it generates isn’t especially valid.
  • It has no spellcheck but, I really can’t hold that against it. Dictionaries require space and power.

As it stands, blog clients for Linux still stink. Look, there is already talk of adding WYSIWYG to blog clients for PDAs! Come on you FOSSdevelopers, get on the clock!

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6 Responses to Blog Clients for Linux Stink

  1. Bakafish says:

    ‘envyed?’ Built in spell checker for the win!

  2. Pace Arko says:

    Yep. I just fixed that flaw in this entry. Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. “For the win?” What’s that? I’ve seen that expression around but I don’t know what the context is? This some chatspeak neologism?

  3. Toby says:

    Gnome-blog :it makes one shudder to think… oh the horror, the horror

  4. Pace Arko says:

    By the way, Toby, can you see the pictures how?

  5. Magnus Berg says:

    Hi!
    I also looking around to to find a acceptable bloc client for linux. It’s no easy. But if you accept to have the client built into Firefox I can recommend Deepest Sender. It’s a extension like the ugly Performancing. And if you install a dictionary (Firefox extension) you can do spellchecks to. I can’t really say which of them are the best one but I like Deepest Sender better than Performancing.
    Then I have tried the java alternativ Jblogeditor. Don’t even waste time to download it. It’s not even a alpha version.
    I think I will stay with Drivel so far but will install BloGTK again and give it a new try.

  6. Pace Arko says:

    Hey! Thanks for the tip Magnus!
    I looked into it. Sadly, I can’t use the spellchecking built into Firefox 2 because my installation of Ubuntu and Gnome make it too difficult for me to update my browser. Also, Deepest doesn’t seem to work with Movable Type’s implementation of XMLRPC–which is what I’m running here.
    I’ll see if I can get a plug-in for my version of Firefox to support spellchecking in Performancing.
    Sigh. Blog clients for Linux still stink.

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