It's been a while since I wrote anything about blogging... okay, so actually it's been a while since I wrote anything substantial at all. Most of my creative energy in the past few weeks has been spent on writing my Ph.D. dissertation, and that's probably where my focus ought to remain... but I'm not particularly keen on using that as an excuse for neglecting my website. So here's a delicious meaty chunk of new content and marrowbone jelly, to keep a weblog active, healthy, nourished, and full of life.
Today I spent a half hour or so playing around with two desktop blogging tools, SharpMT and Zempt. Both of these pieces of software have been created as alternate methods for publishing to Movable Type-based weblogs. While SharpMT has reached a stable 1.0 release, Zempt is still in its alpha stages.
The programs are very similar in purpose, both allowing a user to compose weblog entries outside of their web browser and publish them to the site with a single click. But although I think I could really make use of a tool like this, I found that both of these projects have problems which make them unsuitable for my needs at the present time.
Primarily, both currently suffer from a fairly restricted design -- they're both fine for posting new entries, but as far as I can tell, neither of them are able to let you edit existing entries that have been published using the tools. Editing can still be done through the usual MT interface, but I think that sort of misses the point of using a tool in the first place, and I'm the sort who will edit an entry two or three times even after I've published it because I've noticed some error or thought of something else to write.
I also noticed that SharpMT wouldn't allow me to run my posts through MT-Textile, a plugin which provides a simplified markup syntax for entries and (using another plugin, SmartyPants) improves the typography with smart quotes, em dashes and suchlike. Needless to say, MT-Textile isn't something that I can easily give up.
Zempt does allow me to use MT-Textile, and I see in its roadmap that they're also intending to add the ability to edit existing posts.
To balance out any negativity that might have been conveyed in this post, I'd like to point out that both of these programs look very good, especially SharpMT which is apparently the result of a grand total of two weeks of work.
Using a desktop application to manage a MT weblog seems like a really good idea. The Movable Type web interface is very nicely done as these things go, but that doesn't change the fact that it's easy to lose entries typed in web form fields, or that when my connection is slow it can take time to do even simple things through the web interface. I really anticipate the day when I won't need to administer my weblog through my web browser, and I suspect that I won't have to wait too long for that day.