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Blogjet – still not quite there yet!

Typepad is reasonably user-friendly, but I still have to key everything in using a web brower, which is not ideal (and makes it all too easy to lose your work). So I’ve been testing Blogjet, which is a small application that allows you to create posts offline and publish them. There are others, such as w.Bloggar, which I have only evaluated very briefly, and Zempt which admits to several bugs with Typepad.

Other good thing about these applications are that they make it easier to do clever formatting, they have spellcheckers and they enable you to save posts to disk.

There are two main problems. The first is that these application is not just designed for use with Typepad, and they are trying to accomodate the features and quirks of many different blog services, meaning that not all Typepad features are yet implemented. So, for example, you can’t do future-dated posts, or extended posts.

The second is that they seem to have difficulty with the way that some of the blog services implement certain features. Presumably this is because there is no formal documentation, and standards (such as they are) are not always followed. This means there are annoying bugs. Blogjet allows you to save ‘draft’ posts but then publishes them anyway. w.Bloggar and Zempt seems quite unable to retrieve postings from Typepad (Zempt has it on their list of known bugs). To be fair, Blogjet have fixed a number of the bugs, but it doesn’t inspire confidence when they blame Typepad for the problems without giving a clear explanation of what is wrong, and then fix them without Typepad doing anything!

My dilemma is this – do I pay for software that is obviously not working properly and needs to be enhanced, or do I wait for it to get better?

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5 responses to “Blogjet – still not quite there yet!”

  1. henry avatar
    henry

    you run windows don’t you?

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  2. fumier avatar
    fumier

    I’m a big fan of Typepad. I find it easy to use and they are very helpful.

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  3. Chris avatar
    Chris

    I agree about Typepad – they are very helpful.

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  4. Dmitry avatar
    Dmitry

    Hello! Let me give you an explanation about what’s wrong with TypePad + BlogJet.
    First off, there was two issues with dates.
    XML-RPC, which is used for posting to blogs, clearly states, what format to use for dates:
    <dateTime.iso8601> | date/time | 19980717T14:08:55
    You can find these specifications here: http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec
    However, TypePad do not follow this specs:
    when they give the date for post, they send:
    1998-07-17T14:08:55
    (see dashes?)
    This issue has been succesfully and easily discovered and then fixed. TypePad did’t follow specs.
    Another issue: TypePad’s server changes time, sent by BlogJet, so it includes timezone shift. Other services won’t do it. This is not required by XML-RPC specs. It was very hard to discover this issue and then find a tricky way to fix. It’s now fixed. TypePad did’t follow specs.
    The issue you were talking about:
    1) Post the first entry as draft.
    2) Post and publish the second entry.
    3) Now second and FIRST entries become published.
    Why it’s not BlogJet’s issue? Because BlogJet has nothing to do with the first post when it sends the second one. The difference between sending “draft post” and “post to publish” is in the only value: Publish = True/False.
    You can see the same behavior when you try to reproduce this bug with w.bloggar and other blog tools. It is TypePad’s bug.
    Bad news is that TypePad’s support doesn’t respond to my inquiries.
    Anyway, I don’t blame TypePad. It’s really great service with good server software. And we’ve got a lot of clients who use TypePad for blogs. If they need my help to fix bugs, I’d be happy to help.
    Best regards,
    Dmitry Chestnykh
    BlogJet

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  5. Nathan avatar
    Nathan

    Sauce Reader is worth a try. It’s free for personal use and can post to TypePad (among others). It supports offline editing with synchronisation. We don’t yet support the advanced TypePad features either, but having a reader & weblog posting tool together is very useful for many people…
    http://www.synop.com/Products/SauceReader/
    cheers, Nathan

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