Free Blog Editors Compared

Over the past several weeks, I have written full reviews of 5 of the best known free external blog editors.These are programs that can be used in place of the WordPress “Add New Post” editor. They allow you to create blog additions externally on your own computer, then load them into WordPress (or any of several other platforms).

All of these blog editors attempt to improve on the stock WordPress entry editor and they all do in most respects. All can be used with several different blog platforms, usually allowing easy switching between. All allow you save posts locally or upload to your blog. All allow you to work on a much larger text area than the WordPress editor. With any of these, you can prepare you blog offline for later download, which is nice for travelers.

While most of the following charts are self-explanatory, you might note that: “More” means the capability of continuing an entry to a second page. “Image Insert” means the capability to insert an image. “Catch” notes something you should know about “free” programs. “Multi-Blog Posting” means posting the same blog entry to more than one blog at one time. “Overall” ranks my preference for these programs with “1″ being the best.

* A default setting for Zoundry Raven replaces your business links with their own affiliate links. This can be disabled.

Conclusion
I had actually never used a special-purpose external blog editor before testing these. I am now convinced this is the best way for the serious blogger to manage blog entry. While all will publish an entry directly, I prefer to use the editor to prepare a draft or programmed publish, then give it a final check from the WordPress interface before publishing. WordPress’ own Preview feature is still the best way to know exactly what your entry will look like before publishing, though Windows Live Writer Preview may win me over eventually.

My favorite overall editor is Microsoft Windows Live Writer. I found text entry is a pleasure compared with the WordPress editor. You work in the same page formatting as your final post and it is the only editor on the list to feature misspell underlining, which I really like. However, you cannot transport it on a thumb drive, as you can with Raven or w.blogger. Zoundry Raven has two important features that could make it preferable. It features an Explorer-style tree that allows easy management of blog entry features and it allows for posting to multiple blogs at one time. Raven has recently gone open-source so we may see special-purpose versions appearing with even greater utility. The HTML editing of w.blogger is the best of any, though it lacks WYSIWYG. ScribeFire offers the advantage of being a browser plugin, but little else. Since they are all free, you might want to try more than one until you find the one that best fits your blog entry style.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 4:00 am and is filed under Utilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.