Five Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users
Ask ten bloggers at random what they use to compose their blog posts and chances are that you might get ten different answers to that. Possible options include integrated WYSIWYG editor provided by the blogging software itself; desktop blog clients for Windows like w.bloggar and Windows Live Writer; Word processors like MS Office/OpenOffice; Web based blog composers like Google Docs; Emacs, web browser extensions, sidebar/desktop widgets and things like that. It’s the “to each his own” philosophy in full flow here.
For the GNU/Linux users though, the options are pretty limited and I am yet to see a full-blown, feature-rich desktop blog editor that could post to most of the popular blogging engines that are out there. But all is not lost when it comes to blogging tools for GNU/Linux; there are quite a few options and all of them fulfill certain blogging needs to near perfection. Below I am going to discuss five different ways to compose your blog posts on the GNU/Linux platform along with their pros and cons.
All of them can be installed using apt-get or aptitude on Debian/Ubuntu based distributions and can be compiled from the sources on others(first check with the package manager of your distribution before compiling from the source).
Five Blogging Editors to Make Blog Posts From the GNU/Linux platform
- GNOME Blog Entry Poster
Blog Entry Poster is all about convenience and efficiency. It lacks in features but if you want to make a quick post about a news item/article/announcement that you have read on the Internet, then this panel applet can make it as fast as any other tool. To use it, install it from your favourite package manager or download and compile it from the source, and then right-click on the GNOME panel, select Add to Panel from the menu and finally select “Blog Entry Poster” from the dialog box. You can configure settings by right-clicking on the “Blog” dropdown button that you can now see on your panel and selecting “Preferences” from the menu. Select the type of your blog engine, enter its web location, enter the user name and password and click the “Look up Blogs” button. It should fetch your blog and show it in the dropdown box to the left side of “Look up Blogs” button. Click the “Close” button to save the settings.
Now whenever you come across an interesting story on the Internet, you can just click the “Blog” button on the panel, give a title to the blog post, enter the contents and hit the “Post Entry” button. You have some very basic formatting available to add links, format to bold and italics etc., but as noted earlier, this is not the tool to use if you are looking for a lot of features. You have to use HTML tags to do all your formatting and you can’t even preview before posting. But I find this to be the quickest way to make a short blog post. (Clicking the “Blog” button in the panel again closes the dropdown window, but the text you have entered is still retained in it. Click it again to see what I talking about. This allows you to edit the blog entry over a long period of time.)
Gnome Blog Home page - Drivel Journal Editor
You will love to make blog posts with Drivel if you are a LiveJournal user. This one has quite a few interesting features for users of all type of blog engines but it has tons of features specifically provided for the LiveJournal bloggers. I haven’t found such a good LiveJournal blog editor even on Windows; it allows you to select a mood, set the music you are currently listening to, set custom security and bunch of other stuff while making a post to LiveJournal. It is a decent blog editor for other blogging software too, including Wordpress, Movable Type and Blogger. Definitely worth a test drive.
More information on Drivel - BloGTK Blog Editor
This is a reasonably feature-rich blog editor for the GNOME platform. It supports many popular blogging engines and has good number of formatting option. My personal favourite feature of BloGTK is the ability to create our own custom tags for HTML tags that are not available by default in the BloGTK toolbar/menu. To start posting blog entries, go to Edit -> Accounts and Settings, enter the details about your blog, click OK, go to the File menu and click the Connect menu item. You are now ready to publish to your blog. The main view of BloGTK shows HTML mixed with the content(unlike Drivel that uses WYSISWYG editor) but it supports the preview mode, so no worries there. You can’t use BloGTK with the new Blogger version yet.
More about BloGTK - ScribeFire Firefox Extension
If you are basically looking for at least the basic set of features that one expects from a blog editor and are not put down by the web browser interface, then ScribeFire Firefox extension(previously called Performancing for Firefox or PFF) is an excellent choice for you. It has more features than any of the above mentioned desktop clients, you don’t have to be online to compose blog posts with it just like a desktop blog editor, it has a very clean user interface and installing it is a total snap as you don’t have to worry whether your GNU/Linux distribution packages it or not, or if you have to build something from the source. As it is a Firefox extension, installing it is as easy as going to the ScribeFire extension page and clicking the “Install” button. You can install it in all Firefox compatible web browsers(e.g. Flock). After installation, click its icon in the status bar of the browser and a window will pop-up which covers the lower part of your browser window. You can hide it and re-activate it at will, making small edits to your content while surfing the Internet to collect more information, and, once finished, finally posting it to your blog or saving it as a note locally.
Getting Started with ScribFire Blog Editor - Google Docs as a Blog Editor
The last option I am going to mention is Google Docs. I love its clean interface and use it to keep a lot of content on various topics in separate document files in the draft form. But when I am almost ready to post it to my blog, I take it over to the integrated editor of Wordpress and do the final editing/formatting there. Some people though prefer to do all the editing in Google Docs itself and either copy/paste to the blog web editor in the end or post to the blog directly from Google Docs by selecting Publish from the top-right corner and clicking the “Post to Blog” button. Google Docs is a good option if you use it for other editing purposes too, or to post to multiple blogs, but for posting to only one type of blog, there’s no clear advantage in using it over the blog engine’s own WYSIWYG editor.
Google Docs as a Blog Editor
You can install (1), (2) and (3) on Debian/Ubuntu by running the following commands respectively:
sh# sudo aptitude install drivel
sh# sudo aptitude install blogtk
With (4) and (5), you can learn one interface and use it on any platform.
So what else is there to fulfill other blog posting needs of the GNU/Linux users? I will be particularly interested to hear what Blog Editors do the KDE users use – someone had mentioned KBlogger but I don’t know how good or bad it is.
Update 1: Thanks to all those who have commented on this post, here is the summary of all the blog editors that were suggested by you: Five More Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users
Update 2: Here are two more posts related to the same topic of GNU/Linux desktop blog editors:
Linux Blogging Sucks (it’s well written, not a rant)
Building The Blog Editor List (all blog editors, including for GNU/Linux)
[...] Unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptFor the GNU/Linux users though, the options are pretty limited and I am yet to see a full-blown, feature-rich desktop blog editor that could post to most of the popular blogging engines that are out there. But all is not lost when it … [...]
QuotePingback by Linux Code and More » Blog Archive » Desktop Blogging Editors for GNU/Linux Users — November 12, 2007 @ 5:28 pm
You didn’t even cover Emacs?! Blasphemer! ;P
There are three blogging modes for Emacs:
Weblogger Mode – http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs-en/WebloggerMode
Atom Blogger – http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs-en/AtomBlogger
Emacs Atom API – http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs-en/EmacsAtomApi
I’ve tried Weblogger mode but didn’t have any luck with it. I think my Wordpress install was messed up somehow.
QuoteComment by Rudolf Olah — November 12, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
[...] read more here [...]
QuotePingback by 98clouds » Desktop Blogging Editors for GNU/Linux Users — November 12, 2007 @ 10:33 pm
Hahahaha, I wanted to keep it simple and went only as far as to mention Emacs just by the name. I didn’t mention even the names of command-line tools that some of my geek friends use to make blog posts :D
I visited your blog and liked the stuff on C++/D/Python. More of it would be appreciated :)
QuoteComment by tabrez — November 12, 2007 @ 11:51 pm
What about Thingamablog?
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/
QuoteComment by Mace Moneta — November 13, 2007 @ 2:17 am
[...] check the full story here [...]
QuotePingback by fasterda » Desktop Blogging Editors for GNU/Linux Users — November 13, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
Thingamablog has good number of features, it runs on multiple platforms. But I didn’t like the way it so closely integrates with the blogging engine and re-posts the entire archive of blog entries when it thinks some older posts might have been changed. I am not sure but that might result in a lot of duplicate feed entries.
Someone with more experience with Thingamablog should comment about it. But it appears to be a nice app.
QuoteComment by tabrez — November 13, 2007 @ 8:03 pm
*TROLL ALERT* Emacs, EMACS? Nah, use Vim enhanced. :-P /me ducks the tomatoes. Just have to liven the board a little bit. :-)
QuoteComment by Chris Brandstetter — November 13, 2007 @ 8:14 pm
I wrote an article similar to this a while ago. However, I included http://qtm.blogistan.co.uk/ and KBlogger for Qt users.
See more at http://fullcirclemagazine.org/2007/08/30/full-circle-issue-4/
QuoteComment by Andrew Min — November 13, 2007 @ 8:15 pm
Nice list. Sadly, however, none comes close to the functionality and image manipulation embedded onto Windows Live Writer… which is a shame, because it’s what’s keeping me from switching over to Ubuntu full time.
QuoteAs a full time blogger, I really need a good blogging application and, so far, the one that I feel is the best on Linux is ScribeFire. However, it still lacks some functionality and features which I’d love to have.
Man, if only Live Writer could be run with Wine, I’d have dumped Windows a long time ago.
Comment by arturogoga — November 13, 2007 @ 8:17 pm
Missing flock
http://www.flock.com/
QuoteComment by Moulinneuf — November 13, 2007 @ 8:27 pm
[...] different ways to compose your blog posts on the GNU/Linux platform along with their pros and cons.read more | digg story Links: Trackback link Permalink RSS for comments Del.icio.us Digg [...]
QuotePingback by 5 Useful Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users on El Blog Geek — November 13, 2007 @ 8:47 pm
I use my own scripts built from
Quotevi
bash
perl
sed
cat
head
tail
ftp
wget
a very small (10 line) c program.
admittedly it has taken some years to get the formular right, but works for me.
Comment by memals — November 13, 2007 @ 8:49 pm
@Chris: would you care to elaborate on how you post to the blog engines from vim enhanced? I experimented once with emacs with a local wordpress installation but never used vim to make any blog posts. more info would be appreciated.
@arturogoga: yeah, GNU/Linux kind of lacks an application like Windows Live Writer or w.bloggar. Did you ever try w.bloggar though? I would recommend you do if you have never used it before. And let me know how you like it!
QuoteComment by tabrez — November 13, 2007 @ 9:43 pm
Hi
I’ve tried all of those you’ve mentioned, and found that the only one that works with a new Blogger is a ScribeFire. All the rest of them do not work well enough.
There are though, couple more editor, Bleezer (http://larryborsato.com/bleezer/) being the standing out one.
Alex.
QuoteComment by Alex Bogak — November 13, 2007 @ 9:46 pm
@Andrew Min: I checked out the article you have pointed to and I must commend you on compiling a very nice list. I don’t use KDE a lot, had come across KBlogger once, but had never heard of QTM blog client. It looks like a promising tool(like Thingamablog suggested by Mace Moneta), will give it a try in Mandriva/Kubuntu or something.
@Moulinneuf I intentionally left Flock out from the list for a few of reasons. Firstly, wanted to keep the list short, and also ScribeFire can be installed in Flock too, and I find it to be better than the built-in blog editor feature-wise(at this time).
But Flock’s built-in blog poster is very convenient to setup with multiple blog engines, and there is also no need to search and install a separate extension for it. I also find Flock’s “Web clipboard” + “Blog Editor” to be a killer combination. It will also be automatically updated by successive Flock versions. I look forward to a lot of improvements in both ScribeFire extension and in Flock’s built-in editor in the future.
QuoteComment by tabrez — November 13, 2007 @ 9:58 pm
@memals: that is what I was talking about! ;) But would love to read how you have combined all those tools to finally able to make blog posts. could you care to make a brief tutorial post about it and post it somewhere? or email it to me and I will post it here under your name.
@Alex: Thanks for trying them all out with the new blogger version. I have used only the older version and knew for sure that at least BloGTK doesn’t work with Blogger 2.0 API. So my liking for ScribeFire is more justified that I had thought ;) Bleezer too looks to be very feature-rich. Apart from being somewhat allergic to Java based applications, I couldn’t get it running on either JRE 1.4.2 or JRE 1.5 versions. Will try contacting the creator to sort out the problem(could have tried to edit the code and re-build it myself but the source code doesn’t seem to be available from the website).
Like it always happens, the comments here turn out to be more useful, containing much varied information than the post itself ;)
QuoteComment by tabrez — November 13, 2007 @ 10:25 pm
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QuotePingback by SpyandSeek Blog » Blog Archive » Five Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users — November 14, 2007 @ 12:26 am
JBlogEditor works well for me. Unfortunately it’s not being actively developed at the moment, so it will start losing ground if somebody doesn’t pick the project up again. But right now it’s adequate for my needs.
QuoteComment by Phillip Rhodes — November 14, 2007 @ 12:31 am
[...] Five Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users – [...]
QuotePingback by Tims Blogger | Links for November 13th — November 14, 2007 @ 6:02 am
[...] Five Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users GNOME Blog, Drivel, BloGTK, ScribeFire Firefox Extension, Google Docs as a Blog Editor. (tags: blog linux writing editor extensions google) [...]
QuotePingback by links for 2007-11-14 « Mandarine — November 14, 2007 @ 10:05 am
Unfortunately, I haven’t found any that will post to Blogspot (Google’s new API and all) except Google Docs. It kind of sucks, reall. I’d like to have a simple one on my panel again just for those quick posts.
QuoteComment by Daeng Bo — November 14, 2007 @ 1:13 pm
@Daeng Bo
Yea, you’re right. I’ve been using ScribFire, and I like it though I prefer posting as draft and retouch it in blogger’s editor.
@tabrez & all
I used Zoundry on Windows when I had my laptop at work (they use Windows, you know), and I began to think to try and use it under Wine. I will let you know how it goes…
QuoteComment by Alex Bogak — November 14, 2007 @ 2:38 pm
[...] Guardado en: Uncategorized — jeduan @ 11:28 am Me encontre en digg un artículo llamado Cinco editores de blog para usuarios de GNU/Linux donde se da información acerca de las opciones que tenemos en Ubuntu. La penúltima opción es la [...]
QuotePingback by Publicando desde ScribeFire « Casi Amor — November 14, 2007 @ 10:58 pm
[...] good blog editors for the GNU/Linux platform provided in the comments section of my previous post Five Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users. So much so that I have decided to compile a second list of desktop blog editors for GNU/Linux [...]
QuotePingback by Five More Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users — November 15, 2007 @ 5:09 pm
@Alex: though a native GNU/Linux blog editor will be the most desired solution, until we get there, if one of w.bloggar, Windows Live Writer or, like you mention – Zoundry, can run under Wine, it would at least save some undesirable boots into Windows OS.
Zoundry looks to be a very feature-rich blog editor on par with w.bloggar. I was excited to see that they have made a toolbar version too but it doesn’t appear to be very useful. Do let me know(tabrez [dot] iqbal [at] gmail) if you get the full version running under wine.
QuoteComment by tabrez — November 15, 2007 @ 5:26 pm
My very old article about linux blogging: http://bobrik.vitebsk.cc/?page_id=26 (in russian)
QuoteComment by bobrik — November 16, 2007 @ 1:03 am
[...] blog editors Filed under: Linux — 0ddn1x @ 2007-11-15 22:45:28 +0000 http://beans.seartipy.com/2007/11/12/desktop-blogging-editors-for-gnulinux-users/ [...]
QuotePingback by Simple blog editors « 0ddn1x: tricks with *nix — November 16, 2007 @ 4:15 am
What about logjam?
QuoteComment by andy — November 16, 2007 @ 2:53 pm
@bobrik, really nice post! added a link to it from my second part.
@andy, you won’t believe how difficult it was to find links to the logjam application! finally found it and added it to my second part. Also added a link to its screenshots. Thanks for mentioning it.
QuoteComment by tabrez — November 17, 2007 @ 1:17 pm
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QuotePingback by Percuma Tutorial dan Artikel » Blog Archive » Aplikasi-Aplikasi Menulis Blog — November 23, 2007 @ 9:39 pm
If your blog is WordPress and you can add a plug-in and you want a wysiwyg editor then you might consider installing the Postie plugin that does a very good and very complete job of “blogging by email”. I use Thunderbird on Ubuntu as my blogging solution.
Caveat – I did make a couple small changes to Postie. I wanted all links in my posts to open a new window/tab. Also, I also optimized it to not use JavaScript to open large pics and replaced it with the “target=” attribute.
QuoteComment by Glen — February 5, 2008 @ 8:01 pm
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QuotePingback by Maxim’s blog » Links for 2009-04-22 — April 22, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
[...] few searches on “how to post blog using a client program in linux/ubuntu” this page helped a a lot.Scribefire is in fact a firefox add-on which is a rich-featured client for your [...]
QuotePingback by ScribeFire – a Semi Desktop blog client « Wireless wave — October 13, 2009 @ 9:20 pm
I used Zoundry on Windows when I had my laptop at work (they use Windows, you know), and I began to think to try and use it under Wine. I will let you know how it goes…
QuoteComment by suvan — January 17, 2010 @ 10:01 pm
i loved the Google docs feature to publish to blogger.
QuoteComment by arunkumar — February 21, 2010 @ 9:06 pm