robglazebrook.com

Okay, here’s the scoop: blogBuddy is out. w.bloggar is in.

It’s not that blogBuddy didn’t work. It did, and that was a nice, pleasant surprise. It’s just that w.bloggar is better. And I mean no offense to the developers of blogBuddy… it’s plain to see they’ve put a lot of work into the program. But I’ve been with w.bloggar for about sixteen hours now (yes, a whole sixteen hours), and it’s pretty darn cool. :) For example:

• First and foremost, w.bloggar supports titles. blogBuddy simply took the first five words of my post and made it a title. I didn’t notice the oversight at first, but it quickly became obvious when I checked my site.
• w.bloggar is ~pretty~! It’s got colorful icons and downloadable, customizeable skins. The buttons make sense and are layed out intuitively.
• More than one user can use w.bloggar. This is significant. Megan and I both blog, and both of our blog types (Blogger and Movable Type, respectively) are supported by either program. However, if Megan wanted to use blogBuddy, she would have had to reconfigure the entire program, and I would have had to change it back when I wanted to use it. That would grow old quickly.
• w.bloggar supports a surprising number of services. blogBuddy supports Blogger and Movable Type, two very popular publishing systems, to be sure. w.bloggar supports those, as well as over a dozen more, including Livejournal.
• With w.bloggar, I can edit previous posts that I didn’t even create with the program! For example, I used w.bloggar to edit the title that blogBuddy created.

In other words, w.bloggar is a pretty cool program. There’s other stuff that I didn’t even mention, like the built-in spell checker and the ability to upload files with the click of a button. I’m constantly looking for ways to make blogging easier (and thus increasing the frequency I bother to do it), and this is definitely one of those. I’d recommend the program to anyone who uses any of the major publishing systems (Movable Type, Blogger, b2, TypePad, Livejournal, Nucleus, etc). It’s even available in Spanish, French, Portugese and half a dozen other languages.

Did I mention that it’s completely free? Unless you feel like donating, and this is one of those rare programs where I might.