A ten-minute tour of KBlogger 1.0 alpha
This is a test run of KBlogger 1.0 alpha2 for KDE4. I’m fairly pleased with the wordpress.com interface and probably won’t be using this very often, but I wanted to at least kick the tires on this, so I’m going to try (really, I just opened this program for the first time, this is being written as it happens) to compose and publish this post from inside KBlogger. Before I begin, if you want to try KBlogger on K/ubuntu, it’s in the KDE4 repository. If you have questions, comments, or bug reports for KBlogger, please take them to the project’s KDE-apps page. On with the show!
Good stuff:
Autoconfiguration for the most common blog formats. (fig. 1) Enter your blog URL, username and password, and go.
A two-pane, tabbed interface that’s really nice. (fig. 2) On the left is the compositionn pane, with tabs for “visual editor,” “HTML editor,” and “post preview,” updated in real time. No more waiting for a new page to load to see a preview, or switch from visual to HTML editing! Sweet! The right panel contains a drop-down menu for handling multiple blogs if you’ve got more than one, and a “categories” selection menu. Well put together, no complaints here.
Speaking of the post preview tab, there’s a cryptic button in there called “get style.” Guess what it does? (fig. 3) Cool!
Handy-dandy image uploader Note: I noticed on the author’s kde-apps page that the image uploader is still very rough. I’m glad I read that before trying to publish this. A good idea, though, I hope the developers can work it out.
Not-so-good stuff:
When the composer window is open, you can’t activate the main window. I assume this is a bug.
Saving drafts is real dicey. Once KBlogger forgot my categories, the next time it seemed to forget all my changes. WTF? Not Good.
The visual editor, not to put too fine a point on it, totally sucks. No hotkeys, like nine options, no bullet lists, if that’s not enough for you, of course, you can use the HTML editor…
Or can you? Just now I tried to go to the HTML editor to make this a bullet list. Went to the preview tab, and it looked good. Went back to the visual editor, and my formatting was gone. Well, maybe the editor can’t parse it, oh well. Went back to the HTML editor and my formatting was gone! Okay, the visual editor not being able to handle it was acceptable, if not thrilling. But this is not at all what I expected, and completely uncool behavior. If you go from the HTML editor to the preview and back, the formatting remains intact. I haven’t tried to publish yet, so I don’t know if that works or not.
“Publish” doesn’t seem to publish. It just sits in Local Entries. I don’t know if this is a problem with the publish function or the blog autoconfiguration.
Some wishlist stuff (Note that I have no idea if the developers are working on any of this already or not):
It would be nice to run it in the system tray and be able to pull it up with a global shortcut.
Support for tags as well as categories, and the option to add new tags/categories.
There’s no documentation that I could find, and I did look. The documentation link on the homepage is for 0.5.
The reason I looked is that it’s not at all clear what the “Set Publish Date” does, or what its relationship, if any, is with the “Publish” checkbox.
In all it’s a good beginning. Yeah, it’s rough, but it’s an alpha, and the outline of something good is there. If there are more items under “bad” in my list, I don’t want that to reflect poorly on the good work being done here, these are just a random sample of issues I had in my ten-minute tour of the program. Also keep in mind that I’m running alpha software on alpha software (Kubuntu Hardy alpha 4), and made no effort to debug any problems. This is just the view from the cheap seats, folks. Anyway, the point is, the parts of it I like I really like, and I’m going to keep my eye on this project.
Note: I’m going to copy-paste this into the wordpress web page now, to give a demonstration of the visual editor. I did this post in the visual editor, then copied the code out of the HTML editor. The images are the only part of this post not done with KBlogger.
-pd-
fig.1 
fig.2 
fig.3 
February 9, 2008 at 10:12 am
You keep doing your damnedest to try and get me to install KDE4 I see.
July 21, 2009 at 11:31 am
How did you get the Get Style button to do anything? It just keeps telling me I need to authenticate, even though I’ve given it my username and password.