3 Blog Editors-Make Writing Easy

For several years I have been using the king of ‘Blog’ Editors, Windows Live Writer.  I first found it at BlogWorld in 2007, several months after Microsoft bought the software behind the service and started incorporating it as a free software as a service offering.

WindwosLiveWriter – Top of the Heap of Blog Editors (Rating 9 stars)

A blog editor, is essentially a program that makes it easy for anyone to write and publish content onto the internet.  WindowsLiveWriter has tons of advanced functionality and plugins that make it easy to add and edit pictures, ping a number of services including technorati, and twitter.  They make it easy to add categories, tags, or even publish a single article across multiple web sites with the push of a button.

We have covered WindowsLiveWriter with tutorials extensively before and still endorse it for business users and bloggers of every stripe.

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Using WindowsLiveWriter for Free

You can preview your work, and it works great with WordPress, Blogger and many other online CMS systems.  There is nothing that comes close to WindowsLiveWriter.

Scribefire – A good Firefox Add on and one of the original Blog editors (rating 7 stars)

Next on the list is Scribefire, a program that is a Firefox addon.  Unlike WindowsLiveWriter it does not work when your computer is offline very well.  Since Firefox, which used to be awesome, now goes through more updates than a Windows Operating System, is the primary engine behind Scribefire, keeping Scribefire up to date has and always will be the biggest challenge for developers.  If Mozilla hoses up something useful in Firefox, Scribefire may not work as well as it used to until it is fixed.  During a 4 week dark period back in 2007, I found WindowsLiveWriter and never went back.

MarsEdit2 – Mac only blog editor (rating 4 stars)

Then for Mac users, there is a program that is called MarsEdit 2.

Surprisingly this is the least advanced program of the three.  Its not a bad program and has a Mac look and feel (doesn’t work on PC’s).  But unlike Scribefire and WindowsLiveWriter, MarsEdit2, costs $29.95.

It doesn’t have a third of the advanced capabilities of either WindowsLiveWriter and Scribefire, but we are talking about the proprietary Mac environment, which is not open source nor even competitively sourced like WindowsLive.

If you are working on a Mac and you need a solid offline blog editor, or if you work on a Mac and manage multiple CMS based sites, this tool may be useful if for no other reason than to help you manage and remember your blog/cms site passwords.  But if you are looking for fast, useful and cool tools, you need to turn to WindowsLiveWriter or Scribefire(presuming it works with the latest Firefox).

Some day, I suspect that MarsEdit2 will come in to its own and might be able to keep up with WindowsLiveWriter, which unfortunately hasn’t gone through an update in almost a year, but currently it is so far behind WLW and Scribefire, that it could take quite some time before the bar is leveled for Mac users.