So I managed to lose some work because of Typepad’s system problems last week. They have apologized and offered all their users a free month/fortnight/45 days rebate. Very nice of them.
I also lost some work (hence no long post today) because late last night I hit Ctrl-W by mistake when I meant to hit Shift-W. That’s a windows command/shortcut that closes the window you’re in, and when it’s an I-Explorer window like the one using Typepad (or any other program which is hosted), it closes and you’ve lost whatever you haven’t saved. And of course it happens when you haven’t saved for 20 minutes….really maddening. And of course as it’s Microsoft you cannot turn that feature off.
So I’m now trying out client side blog editors. I’ve suggested to Type pad that they should create their own, or cut a deal with the best one. they referred me to w.bloggar, but having used it, it doesn’t have a live WISYWIG editor. Sad, cos it looks powerful and it’s free. Blogjet is only free for 30 days but as it has got such an editor I’m trying it out now. I’ll be back with the long post on topic tomorrow instead.
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so I tried Ecto, but it’s not WISYWIG which is a pity as it has lots of little things that are nice. But I dont wnat to see the code. Same is true of w.bloggar which has the advantage of being free. I use blockquotes a lot, which put me off Nvu without even trying it
The one I am using is Blogjet which does have WISYWIG and when my trial is up I’ll have to pony up 40 big ones which is some 23 more than Ecto….but it works well so far. Only annoying missing feature is that you cant set the posting time on it.
Thanks for this. So far I like BlogJet. But Typepad needs to get on this pretty quick, and really should just buy or license a decent client and give it to its customers.
I e-mailed paperwight (http://fairshot.typepad.com) for hsi recommendation and he shot back the following:
I would recommend Nvu ( http://www.nvu.com/). It’s based on Mozilla
> Composer, but is a standalone WYSIWYG editor. Also, it’s free. Can’t
> recall off the top of my head if it has spellcheck, but once the text is
> into Typepad, you can spellcheck easily enough.
>
> Caveats:
>
>
>
> if you want to use the blockquote tags, you have to flip over into html mode
> (it’s a tab at the bottom of the edit window, so this is not a big deal).
> Nvu doesn’t have a menu item or button for blockquote.
> Nvu assumes you’re working on a whole page, so when you want to paste into
> typepad, you have to:
>
> flip over into html mode in both Nvu and Typepad before you cut and paste to
> make sure that the html carries over properly
>
> cut from Nvu only between the body tags Another option for a truly quick &
> dirty WYSIWYG (with spellcheck) is to write his posts as emails to himself
> in gmail. When he receives the email he sends himself (it’s
> near-instantaneous), he can hit the ‘more options’ link and then choose
> ‘show original’. The email will show up in plain text and html; he can just
> cut out the html and paste it into typepad (again in html mode).
>
The client-side editor that people seem to really like is ecto
> (http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/ ). It’s not free, but it’s not expensive either.
>
> BTW, I stopped losing so many posts in typepad when I set the default post
> setting to ‘draft’ and just saved regularly. Then you just flip it over to
> ‘publish’ when you’re ready to go.
>
> Cheers,
PW