I will be spending quite a lot of time travelling over the next few years. I need a Windows desktop application that allows me to write content offline on my laptop, and then easily publish the content to my Drupal installations. I have taken a good look around the options and presented my findings. My findings concentrate on general purposed blog applications, and so are likely to be just as relevant to users of WordPress, and other blog or CMS systems.

Background

I intend to travel with a laptop, and regularly write content for my various websites. I will mainly be writing blog posts. I use the Drupal portal system to build my websites. Drupal offers a good blog facility, as well as many other quality modules.

During my 2006/2007 camper van trip around Europe I wrote blog entires into MS Word. Whilst this was easy to do at the time, it did make adding the content into Drupal a long and painful task. I want to be able to publish my offline content whenever I get online, updating my blog during the course of my travels.

Requirements

I need a Windows desktop blog application that allows me to write blog entries, containing links and images. The notes need to be written offline, stored on the laptop and published when I get online.

Key requirements

• Offline editing
• Entries stored on laptop
• Editing of stored entries
• Embedding of photos taken on the trip
• Upload of the images to the Drupal system
• Posting off all offline content to Drupal with a few clicks, and quickly

Research

I took a quick look around the Drupal forums, and did a few Google searches. Drupal has a BlogApi interface which accepts posting using a variety of standards. This allows me a great choice of applications to chose from, rather than a Drupal only solution.

Drupal

All I need to do in Drupal is enable the BlogApi, which is in settings > modules. I then checked the settings for the BlogApi module. There are only a few options available. After reading the notes on the settings page I decided to first try the Blogger engine. I enabled posts for blog, page and story blog types. I had only intended to post blogs, but if I can post other content types then this is an added bonus.

Options

ScribeFire add-on for Mozilla browser

I have just started using Mozilla as my primary browser, and was very pleased to see a lightweight option for use in a browser. ScribeFire was previously known as Performancing for Firefox. I downloaded the add-on, which integrated seamlessly into Mozilla, as all add-ons seem to do. After a browser restart I was ready to go.

A button is added to the bottom right hand corner of the Mozzila Browser. When clicked the ScribeFire window appears in the bottom of the browser UI.

ScribeFire has a great HTML editor including the standard font, and paragraph settings. It also has a WYSIWYG mode, raw HTML editor, and a live preview. The raw HTML editor is particularly useful to me, as I write much of my entires using lightweight raw HTML.

I added a couple of simple posts and saved them as notes. By selecting the posts tab I was able to view, reload and edit my saved posts. Looking good so far.

Now I need to try posting to my Drupal installation. ScribeFire has a blog account wizard which makes connecting to your blog nice and easy. I entered my blog URL. I am testing this with my travel website, which current doesn't not have Drupal URL alias setup. I have always used URL aliases with my other Drupal websites, but I have read several posts by people recently talking about performance problems. I have decided not to use URL aliases for this website. If I want to add them after I can easily create them, and the use the Global Redirect module to perform 301 redirects for the nodes. ScribeFire didn't automatically detect my blog type, and I had to manually select Custom Blog, and then Drupal. It's nice to see Drupal supported though. I then needed to enter the path to the blog API. I checked my Drupal installation files, and entered http://www.itravelabout.com/xmlrpc.php. I entered my username and password, and was connected straight away to Drupal. Great! I was even shown that I can publish blog, page and story content types.

Back to the ScribeFire editor, and I can see that the Blogs tab allows me to select a Drupal content type, and post my current note to it. This is a nice feature, but not what I need as I want to be able to post all of my notes in one go. The Posts tab showed the blog I had already posted via Drupal itself. So good to see 2 way communications happening with Drupal and ScribeFire.

I loaded the content into ScribeFire, edited it and published it back to my Drupal blog. All worked well. ScribeFire does add a 'Powered by ScribeFire' comment to the post when publishing new content, but this can be turned off. I also tried posting a note with an embedded image. I was able to add the img HTML, and ScribeFire offered to upload the image via the blog API. I did so and checked the resulting post in Drupal, which was fine.

ScribeFire has also listed my tags (categories in Drupal), so I can tag posts before uploading.

Now to test my saved notes. I selected a saved note and published it. It appeared on the website fine. However, the note was not deleted from ScribeFire, so I had to do this myself. As there is not option to post all notes as a batch, I had to select, publish and delete each of my posts. This isn't such a bad thing, but if I have 30 or even 100 offline notes to publish this will take a long time. Especially if I am in a internet cafe in south east Asia with a terrible connection.

Now for an offline test. I disabled by network connection in Windows, and then started Firefox. I was able to run ScribeFire, and make new posts. My tags where not displayed, as this is only done when online. I will have to select these when posting my blogs.

ScribeFire is looking good. It has everything I need. The only downside is that I need to be online to upload images and select tags. I also must publish each note separately. But considering I will have to add images and tags when online, this is not such a big drawback. Now let's look at the other options.

w.blogger

I have seen w.blogger mentioned a few times in the Drupal forums. I took a look at the website and it looked promising. After a download and install I was ready to try it out.

The installation installs an extra ActiveX component. In my experience as a Windows programmer this seems like a good solution to the problem of posting to online systems. Some users might not be able to run ActiveX controls though.

On the first run of the application I am asked whether I already have an account, or whether I need help creating one. I select that I already have an account, and I'm presented with a list of account options. Drupal is in the list, as well as many other options. Things are looking good so far.

I entered by blog URL, and then my Drupal username and password, just like I did with ScribeFire.

The application started and displayed a good deal of options to me. I posted a test blog. The blog appeared in Drupal, but was not published. Then I realised there is a separate button for Post and Publish. I tried to upload an image, but had to specify ftp settings, which was a bit disappointing. I wanted to use the blog API just like in ScribeFire. I'll overlook this for now.

w.blogger seems to have the editing facilities I need, but the most important thing is the posting of many blogs as a batch. However, w.blogger does not support this feature. In fact to publish saved notes I had to reload each one from disk, via the file open dialog, and post each one. This is more time consuming the ScribeFire. I need not continue reviewing w.blogger, as ScribeFire is the better option for me.

A Google gave me this great desktop bog overview page on ProBlogger. I noticed that ScribeFire and w.blogger were mentioned. Also mentioned were a few others.

ecto

ecto looks great, but is not free, so I decided to not review this editor.

Qumana

Qumana looks like a good offering. I downloaded, installed and did the usual setup. I entered my blog URL, and then selected the type as Drupal. Setup was easy and quick.

I added several posts, including some images. The editor added lots of markup I did not want. I saved the posts. When back at the main view I was unable to easily publish all my new posts as a batch. I had to open each one and publish individually. I decided to move on as Qumana was not what I needed.

zoundry

Next was zoundry. I downloaded and installed. Setup was easy and quick. I wrote a couple of test notes, including images. I was able to select my categories already defined in Drupal. My blogs posted ok, but once again I had to select each one manually.

BlogDesk

I downloaded and installed BlogDesk. This also only allowed publishing one post at a time.

BlogJet is not free, so I didn't try it.

I took a look at Flock, but it seems to be more for social networking, rather than straight blogging. I was also put of by the look of their website, and the fact the software wasn't at version 1 yet.

thingamablog

thingamablog suggests that it can publish a whole blog in one go. So I downloaded and installed. thingamablog is a Java application. It runs slowly on my powerful PC. It also asked me to create a database on startup. I would like to see a more user friendly UI. I decided to move on.

The website for Post2Blog gave me a headache, so I decided not to install the application.

Conclusion

ScribeFire is my favorite. It is very lightweight and easy to use. It doesn't have anything the other editors do. I will try it and let you know how I get along. I have even published this blog using it. It was an easier experience than using the Drupal forms.