Walter Hutchens’ Blog

For a while I have been using WordPress as my blogging software. Like most blogging applications WordPress doesn’t run from my personal computer. It lives on the server where my blogs are hosted. When I want to use WordPress, I access it through a web browser. I just point the browser towards an address for the “administrative” part of my blog. That launches a WordPress session for creating and editing posts or making adjustments to the appearance of the blog.

In fact, because WordPress doesn’t allow you to easily update multiple blogs through a single installation, I have separate WordPress installations for each of my blogs (this public blog, my private online journal, a private blog I keep about my daughter and some other blogs I’ve created but not yet really used for specific research projects.

Generally I am pretty happy with WordPress. Not ecstatic–but it’s quite serviceable, and it’s free.

But tonight I’ve been looking at some alternative blogging clients. I’ve come across several that claim to work with WordPress. Specifically, I’ve found and already downloaded RocketPost, WB Editor and Qumana.

So far, RocketPost is the clear winner. I’m using it to create this entry. I already like several things about it.

1. WordPress has a row of buttons above the text entry field, but they are somewhat cryptic. RocketPost has graphical buttons that more clearly signal what they do (for instance, numbering this list). That’s a small but nice thing; it improves the transparency of the tool.
   

2. The WordPress text editor is not really WYSIWYG. RocketPost appears to be.
   

3. WordPress requires me to type three hyphens “- - -” to get an em dash “–”, whereas I can get one with RocketPost in the conventional way, by typing just two hyphens.
   

4. RocketPost counts words as you type.
   

5. Better still, I have already used RocketPost to download all the entries from my public blog. The now appear inside RocketPost and are saved on my local hard drive. Having been through a few traumas when something caused my blogs to “break,” I like the assurance of having a local copy of all my posts. I had to try a few times before I got all the entries to appear, but now they all seem to be safely downloaded
   

6. I easily inserted some photos in this entry by simply dragging into this editing pane the photo icons that appear in the “My Pictures” folders in Windows. RocketPost then made the thumbnails below, which will apparently be linked to fuller versions when I post this. Pictures are important, and WordPress doesn’t currently handle them so smoothly. I must use a WordPress plug-in. That involves more clicks than dragging photos into this panel. Also, the plug-in doesn’t provide an easy way to add code to center a photo or “float” it left or right.
   

7. I easily created a table with RocketPost. I love tables, but I rarely use them in blog posts because it’s tedious to try to code tables with html, and I’ve had uneven luck creating tables in MS Word or FrontPage and then pasting that code into a WordPress entry. For the table below, I just hit the RocketPost tables button, then drug the photo thumbnails into the table. Wow!

Image	Caption
	Helen Running
	Maggie & Helen
	Helen Salutes

RocketPost is expensive at $99, but after this short test drive I am essentially ready to plunk down my money. I’ll first confirm this post uploads smoothly, and I’d like to import the entries from my private blog and be sure it doesn’t have problems working with that password-protected site.

Qumana looked promising, but I immediately rejected it after a test post with it because when I opened the test post from within WordPress I discovered not the content I’d sent them but rather just a link to a Qumana site. Let some third party keep my content? Hell no!

WB editor is cheaper than RocketPost, but it’s interface doesn’t look as nice from the screen shots. I’ll download it and compare, but right now I think RocketPost is going to be the tool for me.