My choice of offline blogging – BlogDesk over Windows Live Writer

Written by Terence Chang on June 6th, 2007

As a heavy blogger like me, offline blogging becomes very important piece of my blog works. I primary blog for fun and to put down what my thoughts was and some of the tips and tricks I have learned in my life. So I can come back to check it out later or few years later. So while I am traveling, I would love to continue to blog.

There are many offline blog writer tools out there. You can find the some of them from “The wrong advices.” , (PS. I think it should name awesome advices), which is one of my must read blog everyday. I download the FireFox plug-in “ScribeFire“, which allows you to blog right from your firefox browser. Well. It’s a nice and neat tools. However, I have to remove it after I made one serious mistake. It’s my fault, but I just could not live with it. In the ScribeFire blogging tool interface. There is a place allow you to see your previous blog entries. It’s load from my worldpress blog site. I thought it was like RSS feed or RSS reader, so I thought it is saved on my local computer. So I delete some of them. WOW. I suddenly realize that I am deleting my really blog entries from my blog. What a mistake!!! So I have to remove it to prevent it happens. It’s not very clearly indicate the danger. Again. That is my fault. I don’t blame on the plug-in. It’s a good tools. It’s just not what I expect. I have put together my review about the BlogDesk below.

BlogDesk - CategoryAfter testing the Windows Live Writer, I decided to download the BlogDesk to give it a try. This entry you are reading is post by BlogDesk. First of all, it doesn’t support Blogger.com as far as I can see. I might need to research more on this tools. However, It’s nice and clean. I did not hear my computer fan running crazy at all. It only takes 30MB memory space compare with Windows Live Writer’s 90MB. What a difference. I setup my blog and import all of the categories. I notice that it doesn’t give me the hierarchy of the categories. But I can check multiple categories.

Well BlogDesk does allow me to create a new categories by right click on my blog name in the right panel. Click on “Edit Blog Properties” -> “Categories” tab. It allows you manually add or modify existing categories. Or you can re-download the category list. What I chose to do is to log back on to the WordPress blog site and maually add new categories. So I can make sure the structure of the categories.

In the BlogDesk’s “Blogs and Categories” panel, you can right click on the blog name and “Get categories”, it will re-load all your categories including the new categories you just added to the WordPress. That’s good enough for me.


BlogDesk Image Warning

One other cool and neat thing a the image features. It first warns me about my image size. It it’s too large for my blog. BlogDesk use width 450px for your blog as default. You can, however, modify it to add more option or set your option like this. “600 (Default)”

BlogDesk Image edit

I can chop, rotate, and resize it right from the image edit screen. It also allows me to adjust the color depth, border and alignment. This tool is nicely written and well handle my works. I can even create a thumb nail images. I did not test it because I don’t really need a thumb nail for my images.

BlogDesk writer does allow me to add TrackBacks. It also allows me to check “Add Comments”, “Allow Pings” and “Publish after Upload” to ensure the integrity, which is not available in Windows Live Writer.

It will be nice if this BlogDesk tool can add custom Meta tag for Keywords and Description, which I have to manually changed in the WordPress blog admin.

Overall, this BlogDesk offline writer is way much better than Windows Live Writer. It doesn’t support blogger.com at this point, but I expect they will include it later. Best of all, this BlogDesk is FREE .

 

3 Comments so far ↓

  1. Thank you for this the comparison because I’m in the same step. I tried WLW and it looks nice. Now I’m about trying BlogDesk.
    Could tell me what about you today? Do you still use BlogDesk?

  2. Terence Chang says:

    @Computer Trouble:

    Thank you for stopping by. No. I do NOT use BlogDesk anymore. I use WLW for all my blogging need. It’s a great software that I have no doubt to use it everyday.

    There are certain things that I can’t not do with WLW. For example, I can’t use WLW to add custom meta tag for keywords and description, which is handled by the WordPress plugin. Also the image processor is still not good enough. So I do not like the image to the source image at all. Otherwise, I really like WLW have to offer.

  3. Thank you :)
    I deleted BlogDesk because it causes too many problems with Vista. Although I found some solutions in their FAQ.
    Things like pictures works with WLW fine for me, except for galleries. So, galleries, meta tags and other extra things I do online.

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