Blog Pig Looking For Perfect Tool

the grindmuch better, oui?Rhymes And Ammo/Thirsty –The Roots
Now I use quite a few ways to post to this blog and my livejournal presence. I post from my 43Things and flickr accounts from time to time, but I always have to re-edit the posts, because both sites limit the way the content is formatted when it’s posted from their sites, to JS or LJ.

The only software that I found that can post to both adequately (and this is a loosely used term, believe me) is MacJournal.

I’ve been using MacJournal for about two years, and I like it. I started using it when Dan Schimpf was the sole party involved, but now Mariner Software is involved. I can’t say whether I like the version that’s downloadable from their site. I use the last available version (2.6.1) before Mariner got involved.

I am a fan of MacJournal in any case. It allows me to create my posts and access to some basic formatting. I can create journals for everything and anything; jot down research notes, write creative stories and toodle with ideas. My only problem is the WAY in which my posts go to journalspace using the Blogger API that journalspace provides. Problems exist with posting to LJ as well, but not in the same way.

However, this requires me to tag all the stuff that goes along with every post like so: booksIs This Our Last Timeah dey. Which is a nuisance, because I have to delete that from the top every post, to publish to livejournal because MacJournal has a nice little dialog to do most of that for you.

Also, it strips HTML when I’m posting to either JS or LJ. I have to delete the entire text from the entry, then paste it back into the dialogue box when posting to JS. And it doesn’t work for LJ, I have to log in and edit it. Then I have to re-add it so I can keep a local version of the post. Which is a bit of nuisance, but better that typing freehand into the web based entry dialogs. Also, better than writing entries in Word, which is just terrible and I avoid it as much as possible.

The LJ dialog in MacJournal is limited; now where near as sophisticated as say iJournal, but other than that MacJournal is lovely.

Would that it were better.

I like iJournal. This is a Mac Os X client for posting to LiveJournal. It sucks you account settings, the journals you have access to, including community blogs and automatically detects what you’re listening to in iTunes. It also allows you post your mood, set your ‘security’ aka privacy per post and other little tweaks built into the LJ web based posting form. This is useful, but alas no archive, and no support for the Blogger API, hence no JS support, so as nice as it is, I have to pass.

There are others of course, iBlog (which only supports .Mac subscribers), and other tools, but they lack something fundamental, and so to date, MacJournal tops them all.

What I would like to see is a decent Mac Os X client for JS, but I suspect that the limitations aren’t necessarily in building the software, it’s more in the way JS supports posting clients. Is there any client for posting to JS that will download my categories, and allow me to set privacy and comment settings? None I’ve found so far, and JS is still my blog site of choice, over and above my own site, independently hosted.

Would that there was a super blogging client that supported blogging sites that allows posts from external clients, as well as other popular blogging software like Movable Type, Grey Matter and Word Press.

Alas, no such tool exists, so I soldier on with MacJournal.

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