Monday, February 22, 2010

BloGTK, it works on Linux Gnome and it will talk to Blogger, but is it any good?


I'm testing out BloGTK on my new Linux system, because a little while back my Windoze computer died on me.
My first foray into the use of BloGTK was prompted because I've been reading the Guardian again. I wanted to write an article about some of this stuff that I was reading so I looked for a blogging client/blog editor to use with my Mandriva Gnome Linux environment, to post to Blogger.
After a few downloads that contained deal-breaker problems, (no spell checker, no Blogger support, etc.) I found BloGTK. I started to write my blog post and became more than a little distracted by the things BloGTK can and can't do.
For example I wanted to write some text and make that into a link, but couldn't figure out how to elegantly do it. This is kind of a test of the BloGTK app so I'm just gonna paste the URL in and see if that works - http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/feb/22/supermarkets-cynical-price-manipulation
While I was Googling around looking for a way to insert hypertext instead of just pasting in an URL I also discovered that BloGTK can not upload images either. Apparently this is coming in the next release, and the app's creator is working on it, but that does limit what I am going to be able to do. BloGTK is no Windows LiveWriter, at least not yet.
This is still quite a short post, more of a test, but exactly how short? I once read an article on SEO which said that the ideal website page or blog post should be between 250 and 500 words in length. I'm guessing that the author of this article just pulled those numbers out of his backside, but they have despite that become something of a magic target against which my posts tend to be judged. So I looked round the Blog Editor interface on BloGTK and could not find a way to do a word count.
So to sum up, there are some good things about BloGTK, namely I managed to install it on my Linux machine, it has a spell checker, it's under active development and it will talk to Blogger. But there are also some negatives, it can't do images, there's no word count, and I'm a little at a loss as to how to turn text into an active link the way Google now demands if it is to take any notice of it at all.
I'm sticking with BloGTK for now, and keeping my fingers crossed for the next release, but I'm also looking around for alternatives.

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