I Know The Guy Who Owns This Place

I debated switching blog platforms as I really don’t like the lack of integration of Live Spaces and OSX. It’s bascially a web-browser page that I have to log into and go to in order to post. Before I switch though, I thought I’d give a couple Mac OSX blogging clients a try with my current blog.

I hadn’t known that Windows Live Spaces could enable support for Mac blogging clients. It turns out they each basically use the E-Mail Publishing support available in Live Spaces to access the blog. You need to enable that support on your Space (it’s off by default.) This Microsoft MSDN article explains how to do it.

Thanks to this great post at Devlounge, I’m trying out Ecto, Blogo and MarsEdit.

Blogo definitely won on website branding and simplicity and the ease of adding markup to the post, but it didn’t successfully post to my blog even though it said it had. And then it lost my last version, so here I am re-writing it in MarsEdit.

MarsEdit seems to be more stable on connectivity and blog access, but is far inferior in usability when it comes to markup in a post. I can’t believe there’s not even a simple toolbar to add a link or bold. Instead it’s buried under a weird dropdown menu on the top right. (Additional note: WYSI-not-WYG! It didn’t even automatically add line breaks where I had spacing in the original post. It does look like you can choose different editors though, so I might still have good luck.)

Anyway, if you’ve used any of these clients and have thoughts, let me know. If you know of others I should try, let me know about them too!

~ by bryan on April 5, 2008.