This review might look weird, since I wrote it while I was testing Bilbo Blogger, kind of a live review, if you want.
This is a test of the Bilbo, a blogging client for Ubuntu with a ton of smart features, like WYSIWYG, HTML editor, post previews, ability to schedule posts, handle media files and much more, plus it’s free!
Currently I’m testing the submit function, which is the most vital feature of any blogging client, plus I have assign the following tags with this post; Bilbo Blogger, Blogging Client, let’s check if they show up, underneath. Yes, it did, remarkable!
Now, I’ll try to attach a screen-shoot to this post and update it. If everything works out, we’ll see an image below this line.
That also worked like a charm and the image was added to the media list in Bilbo Blogger.
The Setup
The setup of Bilbo Blogger was painless and took under a minute to accomplish. All you need is the URL to your blog, plus your log-in information, Bilbo Blogger took care of the rest. You can also set your blogs API manually, in case you want to go hardcore, that is.
One thing though, you must enable remote publishing on your blog, which you do in the writing settings, if you use WordPress. But besides that, I had Bilbo Blogger up and running within a few minutes and was able to start publishing this post under five minutes.
The Toolbox
As you can see in the screen-shoot, Bilbo offers you a nice little toolbox on the right, where you can view and set various options for your post, like categories, tags, if you want to enable or disable comments or trackbacks, modify the timestamp of the post, set the permalink and the summary for your post.
You’ll also get a list of all your previous posts, which you can download to your computer, with a double click, for further editing. All your local entries are also stored in the toolbox.
What I miss is the ability to assign meta descriptions to your post. However, since meta tags are theme/plug-in dependent, I recon it could be hard to implant that, in a way that it would work with any theme or template framework out there, though.
Edit
I like the editor, which provides all the basic features such as, bold, italic, underline, code, font size and color, blockquote, links, alignments, lists and split, as well as heading and paragraph options.
Post Preview
As you write your post, you can view a preview of it. The beauty of this feature is that Bilbo Blogger can download your blog’s style-sheet, so you’ll know exactly how your post will appear on your blog, once you decide to publish it.
Besides the WYSIWYG editor, you also have a HTML editor at your disposal. The different editors are accessible through tabs, which makes it easy and fast to work with your posts.
Conclusion
I think that Bilbo Blogger for Linux is a good alternative to Windows Live Writer, maybe it doesn’t have all the features of Live Writer, but it has all the essentials you’ll need to run your blog(s) straight from your desktop, in a creative, easy and fun way.
Bilbo Blogger is available through the Synaptic Package Manager and even though it’s for Kubuntu (KDE), it runs fine under Ubuntu (Gnome) without any flaws so far.
Do you use a blogging client, and if so, which one do you prefer and why do you use it?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I use Live Writer for my blogs and it is awesome, would never use anything else, it also easy to use.