bloggin'

It seems to always be a trade off between convenience and functionality and blogging software is no different. Being new to all this, I launched a thorough investigation of the available blogging clients. I had the following criteria (in no particular order):

• allow working offline (and keep all content locally)
• allow me to host my blog anywhere (like my mac.com site)
  
• rich client composing/editing
  
• run well on OSX
• be written in python
• be open source
  

Well, I quickly found that this was not going to be easy. I had a free copy of iBlog which I had picked up last year through my .mac account. I gave it a half day trial but just couldn't get it to do what I wanted (which admittedly may have been more than it was designed to do). I did like the categories but I am assuming that they are not unique to this product.

I then looked for clients that googled with "python OSX". Not much luck there and I wasn't really expecting anything since, with few exceptions, python apps have weak GUIs and even weaker aqua support in OSX.

Ok, so where the blog gets hosted is not that important as long as I can get the content out at anytime if I should choose to move it to a new system.

I then checked out blogger.com on the recommendation of my friend Pete. It is impressive, even before I was able to use the advanced composition features since Safari is my primary browser. I am now composing and editing my blog with Mozilla. Firefox is supposed to work fine with blogger on OSX, yet although I have had this browser running successfully in the recent past, the current release does a strange little repeating crash/start dance that seems to be caused by one of my third party browser plugins. So I am on Mozilla until either Safari gains full blogger.com support or I take the time to debug the Firefox trot.