Testing Blog Clients: Qumana
I'm doing more writing in the form of blogging these days (and that trend looks likely to increase), so I've been testing out a few blog clients. I started typing right into the Movable Type web interface, but frankly, that's not a good way to do things: I'm not a good typist or speller, so I need a decent spelling cheker. And I have lost several posts when the web browser crashed or I lost the connection, so I decided to look for something a little more stable. Qumana is the best I've found so far: the beta of Version 3 I've been using has both a WYSIWYG and source view, can upload images and has a reasonable spell check. It also has some nice touches: if you create a link, it automatically grabs the URL from the clipboard, But it's not perfect: I wish it could process images (automatically taking an image and shrinking it to a particular size before uploading it). That's no great problem to do automatically in Photoshop, but it would be much easier to do it all in the client. It would also be nice to have some automatic styling presets: I align images to the right in posts, so it would be great if there was a way to do this automatically; right now, I have to do it manually in every post.
The program is free, but there's a reason for that. It's a lead in for an advertising network called AdGenta: you can add adverts from that network with a couple of mouse clicks, so they are hoping that you'll start using that network when you use the client. But you don't have to use it: you can drop HTML snippets in through the source view. Anyway, it's worth checking out: I'll report more here on how the program holds up under further use.
Oh, one other thing: the company is running a competition where you could win a vacation if you download and use the program, allowing it to flag 20 of your posts with a "powered by Qumana" link. I'm not entering this, but the prize is nice: a week of skiing or surfing.