In the world of bloggers the desktop editing Tools keeps a vital Importance. This helps them being more productive as well as more comfortable while blogging. Some Editors provide a spell checker, drafts saver, remote publishing and WYSIWYG-editor with advanced formatting options such as inserting media or structuring the post – which are pretty hard to deal with using online blogging engines.

Lets discuss about few most popular among them. Some of these are free and some shed a few bucks, but at the end of the day all of these will significantly improve your workflow. Though I’ll concentrate on free ones more as those are mostly chosen.

FOR WINDOWS:

Windows Live Writer:

• This is the most widely used blogging tool nowadays. This is also the one I use for doing my offline editing. The stunning features that it provides are
• Very neat tool with perhaps the most easy to use interface.
• Familiar user interface that you could expect from other Microsoft applications.
• Integrates spell checker other than the rich text editing interface.
• Lets you integrate media items like Images & videos to make the blog entries more interactive.
• The most important feature that makes out of the crowd is that you can actually add plugins to it which does add some distinct features themselves. Such as a Wiki plugin inserts a Wikipedia link to the selected word(s). There are many such plugins that are downloadable for free.
• It has also got a preview option. With this you can see how your blog post will look like in the template that you use in your blog.
• It is distributed for free to all Windows users.

BlogDesk:

• Multi-lingual blog editing tool. Dictionaries in 14 languages are included in the integrated spell checker.
• Supports all popular blogging platforms other than Blogger.
• It has a cool image editing feature which lets you edit the included pictures without using any other image editing tool.
• While typing the blog post you can define most frequently used phrases & keywords much like TextExpander (Mac). This helps in speeding up your writing.
• If you link to local files(mp3 / pdf), the files will be automatically uploaded to the server & the link will be modified likewise.
• Posts already published can be edited afterwards and deleted directly from the server.
• You can put and reorganize text before you need to use it in your blog entry. You can create multiple categories where those texts can be stored separately.

Zoundry Raven:

• WYSIWYG blog editor, with XHTML editing and drag and drop from browser-functionality.
• Provides the Unicode (UTF-8) support, quicklinks and a template-based preview.
• You can maintain multiple blogs online and offline and categorize posts by blogs, links, tags and images with a built-in indexer.
• Supports WordPress Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, MetaWeblog and LiveJournal.
• It includes a integrated HTML validator.
• The most important feature is that it is available as a portable version i.e you can install it in your flash drive and carry it along with you & use it on any computer.
• Import all the Wordpress tags from all the posts made earlier.
• It is a completely free tool.

Other important blog editing tools for Windows that needs to be mentioned are

• BlogJet– Most suitable for power bloggers & is a paid version. BlogDesk offers almost the same interface & is also free.
• w.bloggar – Portable as like Zoundry Raven & includes more built-in features than Live writer but is a bit snappy.
• Post2Blog – Light-weight blogging tool which has plugins for IE & Firefox. This also lets you include Amazon Affiliate Links into your posts very easily.

FOR MAC:

MarsEdit:

• It has ability to integrate with other text editors like BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, or TextWrangler.
• Simple yet useful interface.
• Works with all popular interfaces like Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable type, Livejournal, Drupal & Vox.
• You can scan & insert images from your Flickr library.
• It allows you to preview the post in the blog template that you use.
• It is a paid tool, but has a 30-day trial version also.

Ecto:

• The most versatile blog editor available for Mac.
• All the useful & common features like Rich text editor, spell check, draft saving, etc are available in this tool.
• You can extend the power of this tool with available plugins much like the Windows Live Writer.
• A feature worth mentioning is that it lets you include Amazon affiliate links endlessly in your posts.
• Supports integration from Flickr, del.icio.us.
• It also lets you reuse the tags that you have used with del.icio.us earlier.
• This is a paid software but has a 21-day trial version too.

There are many other Mac tools that are also cross platform so they are reviewed in the following sections.

MULTI-PLATFORM TOOLS:

Thingamablog (for Window, Mac, Linux)

• Its a mix of a Blog-editor and a RSS Feed reader. So unlike other editors you can import feeds in it too. So writing posts while consulting feeds can be done at the very same place.
• As mentioned earlier its a cross-platform blog editor.
• Setting up the blog is a bit untidy process but its worth spending time. You need to have Java Virtual Machine installed on your PC for this tool to function.
• The blog entries will be posted via email.

Flock (for Window, Mac, Linux)

• This is in fact a web browser with an integrated blogging tool.
• This is much like Scribefire(discussed below) but a much nicer one.
• You can save clips viewed in the browser to edit it later on.
• This is a simple tool, best suited for bloggers who don’t need a heavy feature loaded blogging tool.

Bleezer (for Window, Mac, Linux)

• Integrated spell-checker & pinging services.
• Uploading files & FTP capabilities are present in it.
• Works with all the popular blog engines.
• You can create custom key shortcuts for custom HTML markup.
• You will need the Java Virtual Machine for it.
• Its designing aspect is poor but very handy & fulfill the needs of an advanced blogger.
• The best part, its a freeware.

Qumana (for Windows, Mac)

• It has got a built-in ad network (Qads) that allows you to insert ads. This makes it out of the crowd tool.
• Other than the common features it has got a important feature called DropPad. With this feature you can drag-n-drop links, texts and pictures onto a desktop pad .
• Its very neat tool for newbies as well as advanced bloggers.

FIREFOX ADD-ON:

Scribefire (Firefox):
Well we all know about the versatility of Mozilla Firefox. It has became a faith that you can Do anything and everything with Firefox add-ons. So our discussion will be incomplete if we don’t actually include an add-on that helps us writing weblog entries.

• It is not necessarily a highly equipped blogging tool, but its a perfect for those who are in a hurry.
• As it is an add-on you don’t need to leave the browser to write the post. You can do the writing simultaneously with the reading.
• Activate the add-on & press “F12” to start it on any page you would like to blog about.

There are yet more editing tools which are beyond the scope of a single post. Though I have tried to cover all the popular ones.

Hope you found it useful. Which one you use? Share with us! Happy Blogging!!

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