While I was away at AU Dmitry released an upgrade to BlogJet. It’s the off-line Blog editor I’ve been using to author every post seen here, and the other blog, since I purchased it back in January 2005.
I’ve been using the new BlogJet “Lime” v1.6 (why is the code name Lime?) through December and have found some refinements which make life even easier…
BlogJet works with all leading weblog services allowing posts to be composed “off-line” in a WYSIWYG interface similar to a word processor. Images, hyper-links and other post features are easily created locally ready to post. If you really want to hack code(?) there is a Code view in the editor which assists with colour coding and code completion as you edit.
BlogJet drafts can be saved as a file to local drive until ready to post. This allows complex posts to be created over several sessions without the hassle of uploading/saving a draft to your blog host every time you edit. When you are ready to post BlogJet handles the blog host login(s) and uploads the content creating links, thumb-nails etc effortlessly.
- Stop that Post!: When publishing you can have BlogJet perform a spell-check before posting. It’s now possible to exit the spell-check without posting if you notice further editing is required. Just as you usually see a typo just after you press Print, with blogging it’s the instant you press Post. You now have a chance to catch those slips before they hit the web.
- When it goes wrong it will recover: Dmitry claims if something causes BlogJet to freeze in the middle of posting an unsaved article it will be recovered when BlogJet is restarted. I’ve never had a chance to test this as yet to see an error which is a compliment to BlogJet, TypePad or maybe both!
- Insert Hyper-link refined: It’s now simple to add Title Hints which show as a tool-tip when you hover over a link in the post.
- Image Handling:
- Thumb-nails Refined: Now indicated with a subtle “Zoom Icon” in the corner
- Flickr Support: You can now post images from Flickr directly from the Insert Image Dialog by entering account details and selecting the image. Cant comment how well this works as I don’t use Flickr.
- Save Preferences: There are lots of settings to control image placement, border, spacing in BlogJet. You can now save your preferred settings as a default. It saves a lot of clicks!
- Thumb-nails Refined: Now indicated with a subtle “Zoom Icon” in the corner
- Group Posting: It’s really simple to post a BlogJet article to multiple blogs, even even if hosted on multiple services, in one operation. Great for informing all your readers in one hit.
- Auto-replace: If I didn’t already have ActiveWords doing this everywhere it would be very handy.
- The most common use of this would be to replace a typed word with a formatted URL link automatically; type “BlogJet” & get “BlogJet”.
- It can also perform simple text replacement.
Those are just a few of the new features that I’ve found useful. For a full listing refer to the BlogJet 1.6 “Lime” release notes!
More information and a fully functional 30 day trial version is available from: http://blogjet.com/
