Offline Blog Post Editing on Mac OSX – Part 2: Blogo

Blogo is a commercial blog post editor by brainjuice. The license costs $25, but you can give it a try for free for 21 days. Note however that Blogo1.3 (reviewed here) won’t run on Mac OS X Lion said the developers on the brainjuice web site. It seems that Blogo will be discontinued.

Picture 1: Install Window with Supported Systems

Installing Blogo is straight forward. First a window asks you for your blog system (seen Picture 1). Several platforms are available: Typepad, Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Movable Type, Drupal, and Expression Engine. There is also Twitter on the list although the web site states that it is no longer supported by Blogo 1.3.

Picture 2: Post editor

The integration with other applications is partial. You can drag images from the finder or other applications and insert them into your post. But, when it comes to text, you can only paste raw text. Formatting and links are lost.

Wysiwyg is only for text. Images are displayed as small gray rectangles in the editor (see Picture 2). Fortunately, this is compensated by a powerful preview function. Blogo uses the CSS and plugins of your blog. Thus, you get an accurate view of the full page with your post, including links (clicks have no effect) and animations.

We also like the way links editing is handled. A click on a link opens an editor. It allows not only to change the URL, but also the tooltip and the text. A dedicated button allows you check the edited link by opening it in a web browser.

Surprisingly, Blogo has two policies for post saving. A new post can be saved into your local disk. You provide a file name the first time you save. Then, you can save your post as many time as you want by a classical CMD+S shortcut. The second policy becomes active after saving your post as a draft into your blog. You can still save a local copy, but you’ll be prompted for the filename each time you press CMD+S.

Blogo does allow defining categories and tags for your posts. However, we believe it’s a bad idea to mix categories and tags in the same text field. The two other things we dislike about tags handling is that tags from other posts are not listed and the area for editing tags is 1 line with no scroll.

Let’s finish this post with a positive note. It’s about automated file transfer. Pictures inserted into your post are sent on your blog together with the draft of your text.