Over the years the WordPress dashboard has improved enormously. From being a relatively frustrating experience, creating blog posts with WordPress has become very slick and straightforward. However, for many reasons, some people prefer to put their posts together offline or in an external application, or on their mobile devices and have the publication handled automatically. Today we’re going to have a look at six of the best desktop and mobile applications for blog posting.
Windows Live Writer 2012
For Windows 7 or Windows 8
Windows Live Writer is part of the free Windows Essentials suite from Microsoft. It’s a desktop application that enables users to easily create and format blog posts, with photos, videos and maps, and publish them to a range of blogging platforms, including WordPress. It has a fully featured WYSIWIG editor and an interface similar to recent versions of Microsoft Office.
MarsEdit 3
For MacOS X
MarsEdit 3 is a full featured, paid-for blog editing suite for Mac from Red Sweater. It includes both rich-txt and HTML editing, and great media handling features, including integration with other Mac software like iPhoto and Lightroom. It handles image uploading with no problems, and will resize images as needed. It’s compatible with a lot of blogging platforms, including WordPress and ExpressionEngine through the RSD protocol.
Blogilo and BloGTK
For Linux
Blogilo is a QT-based open-source blogging client for the KDE desktop, but it’ll also work fine under GNOME. While not quite as pretty or feature-packed as its cousins on Windows and Mac, Blogilo handles the creation, formatting, and publication of blog entries with aplomb. Blogilo is part of KDE PIM, so you can probably find it in your distro’s default repositories. For those of you who prefer to use GTK apps, BloGTK is a fine alternative. It’s not in the Ubuntu repos, but the developers make a PPA available, which can be easily added to your Ubuntu installation.
ScribeFire
Cross Platform
Many who want to use external application for blogging, choose to do so because they don’t want to be restricted to using a browser, while some just prefer a different interface. For the latter group, ScribeFire is a great solution. ScribeFire is available as an extension for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. You can connect to multiple blogging sites, and compose, format, schedule and publish blog posts.
WordPress for Android
WordPress for Android is the official Android client from the developers of WordPress, Automatic, Inc. It has a very slick UI, and offers a comprehensive range of features, including all the usual editing and posting options, as well as access to stats. It also has some excellent Android integration, like the ability to monitor and manage comments using your phone or tablet’s notifications. You’ll need a device with Android 2.1 and newer.
WordPress for iOS
WordPress for iOS is the official iPhone and iPad app from Automatic, Inc. It has much the same feature set as WordPress for Android.
Have you come across any apps, especially for mobile, that you like better than the ones we’ve mentioned here? Let us know your favorite way to compose WordPress posts in the comments .
