So here I am blogging on my new laptop, which is also my oldest laptop. I picked it up cheap from a buddy of mine, complete with its tiny hard drive, slow processor, and long, long battery life. This will become my day-to-day writing laptop, so it will also be the platform on which I do the majority of my blogging. Now, I haven’t actually tried my blog software on this thing yet, but it is really, really slow on my other laptop, which is about three times faster and has a lot more hard drive space, so I’m not optimistic that I’ll be able to tolerate its performace here. Plus, I need a blog that better supports having multiple machines. It’s time to accept that iBlog is likely a dead end, and find an alternative. Maybe some of you can make recommendations.
Her are the requirements:
1) Able to composse offline and update later (absolutely not negotiable).
2) Can embed fancy html in the episodes, or can create custom episode templates easily (in minutes).
3) Can update from any computer (or phone).
4) Search-engine friendly URLs
5) Custom CSS for episodes based on category
6) category pages can have different display rules (some categoried display oldest to newest while others are newest to oldest, for instance).
7) Some way to automate transferring a very large blog, complete with internal links and lots of custom HTML in various episodes (intern?).
Dr. Pants recommended WordPress, which has a lot of people tweaking it alll the time, so that’s my front-runnner right now. I’m certain I could do all the above (except off-line composing, perhaps) using a fancy content management system like Drupal, which I know in an offhand way. It’s pretty darn powerful and pretty darn versatile, but to turn that into a working blog the way I like it might be a lot of work. I’ve used blogger a bit, but it seems quite limited for what I want, at least on the surface. The other online blog services seem to be similarly inflexible.
What offline editors are out there I could use? Are they going to be too limited, since they are made to be universal? How would they handle embedded images and custom markup?
So, I’m wondering if anyone out there has any suggestions.
I replaced iBlog with RapidWeaver for use on my .mac account.
You should check out Ecto. It’s Mac only and a fairly decent off line editor. It plays well with WordPress and all the other mainstream blogs.
I’d like to recommend MarsEdit. It meets most of your requests/requirements and it allows for posting to multiple blogsites along with customizable ways to input frequently used html tags.
I just had a really bizarre experience. I was arriving at my classroom, and sitting in the hallway just outside the door was a Jer look-alike.
I’m not kidding. Same lengthy hair, same color, same furry face, also same color, same glasses, same style of clothing, and — get this — same older-type MacBook laptop computer, at which he was rattling away.
You wouldn’t happen to have an evil twin in Albuquerque, would you?
The Albuquerque twin is the good one. Don’t ask me how I know.
Opera has a good bloggis service, you can even chime in from your phone!
http://my.opera.com/community/
pL
Opera is a nice blog as long as you ignore a couple of my requirements. For kick-ass moblogging, it’s pretty dang good.
Ecto and MarsEdit are good drivers, but doesn’t address the engine.
Which parts can’t you do? I imagine it’s transfering the old blog, but never tired to do that really.
pL
I recommend WordPress or MovableType. WordPress is nice for its plugins and usability. It let’s you get things done. Not that I have done anything on my wordpress site lately.