Filling the market gap for offline blog editors

Some readers of this blog have left some great comments to my post last week about offline blog editors. In that post, I talked about ecto for Windows, BlogJet and Qumana as examples of popular editors for Windows (and for the Mac, in some cases) which enable you to write your blog posts offline, on your own computer.

I'm now looking closely at Anconia RocketPost, a suggestion from Netanel Jacobsson.

On just a first quick look after install, I am impressed with this tool. It's the closest I've seen yet to a solution to what I believe is a yawning gap in the market for a robust and reliable blog editing application for Windows that's easy to use yet with powerful features. A sort of Microsoft Word for blogs. Could this be the one?

RocketPost offers a 30-day free trial which I'm on. Then it's $100 for the license for the professional version (there are three versions including a free one).

I'm writing this post with this app. Very easy and intuitive to use.More later once I've played a bit with RocketPost.

[Edit] Hmm. It didn't publish without my going into TypePad directly and publishing it. The post was in the list of posts and shown as published, but it hadn't been. I'll hold judgment on the reason as I suspect it's more to do with Typepad - the server response back to RocketPost from posting took a very long time (4+ minutes) and logging in to my account simply took ages.

Comments

[Mike McClary]

Thanks, Neville for writing about this! I'd never heard of ecto until I read it here (and heard you and Shel discussing it on FIR this week). I work on an iMac so I was interested in taking it for a spin. So far, I'm really impressed with it. I had a little trouble setting it up for my WordPress blogs but soon I was up and running. The only kink I've found (and I'm still trying to work around it) is that when I post to my blogs, only the title shows up with a "Read this entire post" link -- not the entire post. I then have to go into WordPress to delete the code. I hope this is only a side effect of the trial version and not the full, registerd version. Stay tuned.

[Nevon]

Mike, glad you found that info useful. Everyone I know who uses ecto for the Mac has good things to say about it.

Interesting to hear of the issue with WordPress you mention. Not sure what that could be as when I use ecto for Windows with my WordPress blog, it posts ok although there are still some issues (not the same one as yours, though).

But I only know about Windows versions of such tools! I'm impressed with the new Qumana. They're doing some good work with developing this upcoming version.

I have to say, though, that RocketPost looks especially impressive. I'm pretty certain the problem I mentioned with this post was to do with TypePad (or, to be fair to TypePad, perhaps the XML-RPC interface, I don't know) as the single post I've written today with RocketPost published faultlessly.

[Jake]

Wow, Anconia is REALLY nice looking! Pricey, but you certainly get what you pay for, or so it appears.

[Netanel Jacobsson]

Nev, it probably has to do with Typepad, I have never had any problems in posting with it ;)