Windows Desktop Blogging
The de facto standard application is “Live Writer“. I found four alternatives to Live Writer discussed on the Make Use Of website (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-alternatives-to-windows-live-writer-for-blogging/). Chris Hoffman discusses the topic and you can read general information in his blog (use the previous link). I will discuss them in the context of bridgeblogging.com and blogging about bridge.
Live Writer
Because Microsoft have announced the end of the Windows Live brand, the big issue regarding Live Writer is, “How long will it be supported for?”. Apparently Microsoft have said it will run fine on Windows 8, so it’s not an immediate issue. Perhaps because we can always ask that question of free software, it isn’t an issue for you.
Quoting Chris Hoffman, “Windows Live Writer was (and still is) the best desktop blogging client out there. It’s a shame they seem to be moving to kill it after cornering the market“.
Although I found it a bit quirky in my usage, it worked well and did what it said it would. It was certainly better than any of the other desktop blogging applications I tried.
The only warning I would give is to resize photographs yourself before inserting them into blog posts using Live Writer. This is because the image is uploaded as-is, meaning it can be very large, depending on your camera settings and how you stored it on your computer. It appears a reasonable size because of the HTML markup used to display it — basically when a person views your blog post, the large image is downloaded and the browser does the resizing on the viewer’s computer.
My advice would be that if you are already using Microsoft Live Writer, stick with it unless it becomes totally unsupported and starts failing.
Zoundry Raven
Well, this might have a reasonable review when one surfs the Internet, for example, the link below. I found it so buggy that I would not consider using it — I’m not sure what the reviewer was smoking, but it sure wasn’t plain tobacco. Downloading, installing and testing it was a waste of time. I also gave up trying to install the very-latest version of it from SourceForge — it is simply not packaged for installation.
Links
BlogDesk
Allows inserting images which BlogDesk takes care of uploading to WordPress. It also makes sure that images are not too large. If they are, it provides a dialog which allows one to pick a size and then it does the resizing — nice.
The program allows you to submit a post as a draft, but the nomenclature is a bit odd — uncheck the checkbox beside “Publish after Upload” and then select “Publish Post” from the “File” menu!
The program has one annoying quirk which appears to be something just not updated — selecting the “centered text” option (i.e. the appropriate justification setting for centered) does not work. What it does is set a depreciated (i.e. not standards-compliant) tag option. It may be possible to fix this by switching to the HTML view and changing the tag (using style=”text-align: center;” in the paragraph tag), but I didn’t try it.
On the whole, it seems pretty complete and may be a reasonable substitute for Windows Live Writer.
Links
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ScribeFire, a Browser Plugin | Mac OS X Desktop Blogging |  |
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