Offline Blog Post Editing on Mac OSX – Part 1

According to 2011 statistics by Technorati and Blogpulse, the number of blogs is estimated to 164 million. However, other figures makes us believe that the blogosphere is much larger. Topingdom reported that there were 39 million Tumblr blogs and 70 million WordPress blogs by the end of 2011. If you add the 46 million blogs that Livejournal claims, we have already 154 millions with only 3 platforms. Knowing that there are many other blog hosting services such include big ones such as Blogger, Posterous, and Typepad, no doubt that the actual number of blogs is 200+ millions or even more.

These hundreds of millions of bloggers post on some blog platform. Most of these blogging services do provide many facilities to support writing. However, the network lag slows down the writers’ productivity. There are also situations where one has no Internet access, such as in a plane. Editing has then to be done offline.

Word processors are not a good idea for preparing posts. Simple ones such as TextEdit, or feature rich ones such as Microsoft Word or Apple Pages suffer from the same important limitation. Once you want to publish your post, you still need to upload each image to your blog and insert it at the right place of your text. Not mentioning that most word processors do not support embedding HTML code which is often needed for inserting media provided by other sites such as youtube or vimeo.

A better solution is to use an offline blog post editor . For Mac users, there is only a handful of them:

• Blogo
• Ecto
• iBlog
• MacJournal
• MarsEdit
• Qumana

This post is the first of a series where we’ll be reviewing these software. Actually, we will not be considering iBlog, since it is discontinued since 2007. We also decided to leave aside web browsers plugins as well as tools for micro-blogging.