The Pain Of A Linux Blogger (Ubuntu)
Using a browser to blog feels very restrictive to me – so this may all read as completely irrelevant to you if you do not feel the same way.
Touting myself as a regular blogger would be lies – so I won’t do that – but when I do blog I like the freedom that I get by editing at my leisure offline in a non-browser client.
When I removed Windows Vista from my trusty laptop recently I installed Ubuntu 10.04 and have truly loved it so far. There had to be a down side though – right?
Here is your task:
Have a good look through the results and make sure to note down the features.
Glance through the features and scribble out all of the blog editors that do not support image/file uploading. How many are left?
I’m guessing that you are going to find NONE. Very disappointing.
Sure – you’ll bump into loads that will half do the job and must only be used by people who love text only browsers. You’ll get the odd one that does support image uploading like Gnome Blog but go ahead and try using it. You’ll soon find that positioning that image in your blog post is impossible and any kind of text formatting other than the cryptically iconified (pretty sure iconified is not a word – but you get the idea right ? icons… etc) bold and italics is out of the question.
What to Use
It deeply saddens me to say this but the only option is ScribeFire. Don’t go thinking that you can use ScribeFire in Chrome though – because that version doesn’t support image uploading either. No – you are stuck with the Firefox version.
In order to make it feel like an independent client, I open up Firefox and then open ScribeFire in a new window – then close down the main Firefox window. Utterly useless approach but it works.
The reason I am saddened in having to use ScribeFire is because the WYSIWYG interface is clunky and doesn’t support half of the standard HTML tags you’d expect – e.g Header tags.
What Does The Future Hold
Not a lot if you go by the suggestions that get created in the Ubuntu brainstorm site, here, you’ll see that there is clearly limited inclination from the Ubuntu programmers to implement something great for the everyday blogger using Gnome. Granted, it should not just be their job to do this – but they own the most popular Linux desktop platform so responsibility has to lay somewhere – right?
Ubuntu needs to nail the Social aspect of the OS and has made good strides with Lucid (10.04) but for me – this is a major black hole in their arsenal when trying to sell their wares to MAC and Windows users.
… Create a Gnome version of Windows Live Writer and watch ‘em flock around …
Tags: blog editor, blogging, ubuntu
