Tri Nguyen

Sitting in a bus, an Airbus, or your dentist’s office with a desperate yen to post, but you’re not on-line? I recommend two desktop apps, Zempt and w.Bloggar, for just this situation.

Both talk to WordPress through its XML-RPC interface. Both do the job well and are free.

Zempt 0.4 is Windows-only. Compared to w.Bloggar, Zempt is less featureful. I like its simplicity, though, missing only the ability to upload pictures (which you’d have to be on-line to do anyway).

w.Bloggar 4.0 works on many OS platforms. It’s really featureful, and does allow picture uploads. If you care, its HTML markup tools are a strong point. w.Bloggar’s web site, unfortunately, is mysteriously down. (Update: wbloggar.com’s back up!)

Note that pictures won’t upload in w.Bloggar unless you get the your FTP Host and Remote Path strings just right. Remember, the latter path is relative to your entry for the former! This hung me up for days.

I’m a huge fan of Markdown (by the way, here’s a useful Markdown syntax cheat-sheet), so I’m happy to report that Zempt and w.Bloggar do exactly what you’d expect: they pass your Markdown markup to WordPress which handles it as usual.

Something that neither Zempt nor w.Bloggar do, however, is process your post’s Markdown for their preview panes. It’s a feature that’d make even more happy with these apps.

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This entry was posted Monday, March 28th, 2005 at 9:41 am and is filed under geeking. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.