I’ve been searching for a decent blog client for Linux. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a go to client that everyone is fired up about. Scribefire seems to be the closest, but I don’t like Firefox on my system- it’s sluggish compared to Opera. From my poking around, it looks like Linux people tend to role their own in many cases which obviously reduces the demand. That said, I’ve downloaded and run QTM but it’s too temperamental. It gives me a lot of trouble posting and I haven’t taken the time to figure out why. I saw that BloGTK2 was available now, so I downloaded BloGTK2 last night and decided to try it.
First impression- holy crap there are TON of dependencies. I put it on my EEE and it seemed like I was installing Gnome in order to get it to run. But now that it’s up and running I’d say it has a lot going for it. The interface is intuitive enough that I didn’t have to refer to documentation. I did run into a bug using the account “auto-detect settings.” After I had setup my first account, the app crashed when I tried to use it to setup the second account. The feature worked when setting up my first account. I just manually setup the second account and I was able to post and refresh both accounts without issue. Which was good- I was expecting it to give me fits posting after the setup problems.
I have a web based blog and then a duplicate on my local network. Ideally, I’d like something that makes posting to the two pretty straight forward, Unfortunately, BloGTK isn’t it. It launches a separate editor window based on the account selected. So there is no way to write something, publish to blog a, select blog b, publish to blog b. Instead, I have to select the second account, edit another post, copy-paste, then publish. Also, there is no obvious way to add pictures to a post. Instead, I posted to drafts on the sites and then added the pictures using the browser based editor.
Other minor gripes- the “quit” menu item did not work.
As for overall feel- it’s seems that GUI email clients were a big influence. The main window is a three-paned interface with the account list on the left, and then a list of previous posts on the top right, with a preview of a selected post on the bottom right. As I mentioned, a new window is launched for editing posts. The good thing is that within the confines of the design, things that you’d expect to work, in fact, do. It’s not WYSIWIG, but there is a preview window so you can get an idea of what the post looks like. Unfortunately, it still needs some work as some formatting (like extra line spacing between paragraphs) doesn’t seem to show up.
Relatedly, an interesting design choice in the editor is to have a tabbed-panel for editing the main portion of a post, and then another tabbed-panel for providing the extended portion of the post. This was NOT obvious to me. I was originally thinking that not providing builtin ability to create an extended-entry post was an annoying oversite. Instead, the means for doing so is different from the more familiar button approach. I actually liked this, even though it wasn’t entirely obvious to me what was going on.
Other things I liked, the category choices are there in the editor, so selection is easy. You can also set options for comments and trackbacks. Posting to “Drafts” works as well. Did I mention that it’s pretty bug free? Seriously, based on other the other options I’ve tried, you’d be surprised at how much this counts.
If I was running Gnome, then this would probably be a winner. Even so, because enough works well out of the box, I’ll probably stick with it for awhile. If you’re looking for a good client, check it out here.