Top 5 Blog Publishing Platforms

We live in a world dominated by the internet, over the last 3-4 years blogging has gone through the roof, it is a way for a lot of people to express their views, it allows people to commentate on every day life, it can be seen as an output for people. Other blog writers use blogs to release news or press releases. It has become so integrated into our everyday lives that it is certainly here to stay. Yippee!

Now, I have always just done the usual, logged into my blog and composed a new blog post before posting it. It has worked for me and I’ve been happy to do that. Over the last few months however, I have been getting behind on updating my blogs and I find the action of logging in and starting a blog to be annoying. I know most blogging platforms have the ability to save a post as a draft, but for me it is a feature I just don’t use; I either write it all, or don’t write it at all.

This got me thinking about how I can make it easier for myself and the answer was to use a desktop programme to organise and help me be more efficient with my blog writing. So, after not spending very long using them I now have my Top 5.

5. MS Word – Unless you use it properly, Word is a big big no-no! Microsoft Word is the first choice to a lot of  people that are new to writing blogs, they write them in Word and then copy and paste them into WordPress to publish them. This is bad! When you copy text from Word and paste it into WordPress, just view the source code of the post and you will notice that there are hundreds of lines of code inserted. If you copy and paste from another website (which you shouldn’t be doing anyway) then you will find that when you post the blog it can keep its original styles. If you do use Word it is possible to publish directly from Word, which is ok, but if you have the ability to set up the connection then I doubt you would be using Word in the first place.

4. Thingimablog -  It is free! Thingimablog is like the others as it can handle multiple blog accounts and has a rich editor but i find this software too busy for me. You can read news through the integrated newsreader and even make blog posts about it but for me, it encourages people to be a little more lazy with their blog writing and for people who are not fully up to speed with the ethics, it could just encourage plagiarism. (I do feel like I’m contradicting myself a bit here as I do like the ability to search Flickr for images and use them, which is kind of the same thing).

3. W.bloggar – W.bloggar does exactly what it should do but when using it i feel like it is a little rough around the edges and it’s not quite what I would want to use on a daily basis. It has everything you would want it to though, such as a rich text editor and it has a spell checker built-in which some of them don’t; if you go to the code view it will colourise your code for you, which is nice, and a really great feature which they have released is the portable version. I do like the idea of having my blogging platform on a portable device such as a USB. Blogging is something that can be done anywhere, as long as you have a computer and an internet connection.

2. ScribeFire – Ok, not a desktop application but a great Firefox plug-in; it gives you the ability to add multiple blogs which can be switched between at ease. It has a preview pane which will use your blog template  and also connects well with Flickr so you can source images. If you close the plug-in, it will still save your posts so even though it is a plug-in it still works really well. If you are easily tempted by the dark side then ScribeFire is also connected to a links company which makes it easy to sell links through your blog. I really wouldn’t advise using this feature though.

1. Windows Live Writer – At first position is something that I didn’t expect to like and that is the Windows Live Writer. This is purely down to the fact that because it is from Microsoft I expected it to be pants! Windows Live Writer does everything I would want or need it to do; good features include the ability to manage multiple blogs at once, being able to select the author of a post from the options as well as the ability to add plug-ins. It can also connect to YouTube and Flickr, the plug-ins directory really does have a lot to offer and I was genuinely surprised whenIi started to trial this software. Windows Live Writer is now a permanent feature on both my work and home PCs.

Gary Douglas
SEO Programmer