The Author – Bart Busschots
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Oct
21
Bleezer Test Post
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 21, 2007 at 10:26 pm
This is a test post from within Bleezer to give it a test run. First impressions are not good. It has messed up my categories because it doesn’t support hierarchical categories, or if it does, it’s buggy as hell with WordPress. The GUI feels typical of free software, it feels crude and un-polished. As a Mac user I’m not at all impressed.
I’m only a few minutes in an already it’s making a dogs dinner of my post. Inserting and removing paragraph breaks is buggy as hell. It’s throwing in needless and un-wanted style information into it’s paragraph tags and missing paragraph tags around some paragraphs. In short, if you care about the markup of your post this app is not for you. It is simply not robust and keeps on being insanely annoying. The one thing that a text editor needs to do is get text editing right, this fails miserably.
Actually … I can’t get the next paragraph to be a paragraph. I’m going to have to go to the HTML version and hack it. I’m only five minutes in and already I’m so pissed off with this that I’ve decided to nuke it. This software is not ready for the real world. I haven’t used anything as crappy as this in a very long time. Enough said really.
P.S. When I send this to wordpress I’m going to add a screen-shot of the total dogs-dinner Bleezer made of marking up this review.
P.P.S. When this made it to WordPress it had lost the categories I added and while publishing the GUI just froze, no progress bar, nothing! There was no visual clue at all that the whole thing hadn’t just locked up. Also, it stuck in style attributes which over-ride my site’s style (I manually removed them from within WordPress). What the hell was it doing forcing my text to be left aligned? Surely my blog’s style sheet should determine the presentation, not Bleezer!
Turns out there is no built-in spell checking either, FireFox showed me a plethora of spelling mistakes to correct. What on earth is the point in a blog client that is miles behind what is offered by FireFox? I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a less able piece of software. It has actually genuinely annoyed me with it’s crapiness.
Powered by Bleezer
Looks pretty weak alright. I have to ask though, what is the point in it.
WordPress provides all those features by default (I thought), I can’t see *why* you’d use it.
In theory these kinds of apps are supposed to provide a better word processing interface than WordPress itself and are supposed to allow you to compose off-line. So, when you’re on a plane or somewhere without out broad band you can work away on your blog posts and then publish them when you get access. I like the idea, Bleezer just SUCKS at it!
The market leader for this kind of thing is MarsEdit which is written by the same guy who wrote NetNewsWire which I simply adore. I heard Bleezer described as “the free equivalent to MarsEdit” on a podcast so I decided to give it a go. Big mistake! I really must try MarsEdit some time soon.
Bart.
Thanks Bart, I’ll give that one a miss then! Mybe I’m missing the point but I thought the idea was to keep things web-based/ platform independant these days? The mac world is making very lazy I think ..
I’m the author of Bleezer. Sorry you had such a rough time of it. For the WYSIWYG editor I use a freeware tool called Kafenio which has some issues. I just haven’t had a chance to get back in to rewrite that stuff. I need to spend a little more time with the WordPress stuff as well.
The things you’ve commented on are things I have planned to work on, but it’s a one man personal project so it often comes behind the paid work.
Thanks for trying it out, and thanks for the comments.
– Larry
“””feels typical of free software, it feels crude and un-polished. As a Mac user I’m not at all impressed.”””
Seriously, I don’t know who you are slating here, FOS people or Apple worshipers.
Bart there is one good thing about FOS, if you don’t like it. Change it.
So is this thing suppose to be for off-line bloging?
Sadly Vish the reality is that a lot of free software really falls down on GUI design. I think it’s partly because a lot of FOSS software is written nerds who prefer the command-line anyway, and partly because many FOSS projects are lacking a benevolent dictator with a vision, hence, design by committee.
Mind you, on the Mac bad GUIs seem to be less tolerated, I run lots of free Mac apps and none of them have crappy GUIs.
Anyhow, yes, this thing is supposed to be for blogging off-line.
Bart.
Hi Larry,
It’s the editor that’s the real problem and since blogging is all about writing that’s a show-stopper for me.
Also, if you know the support for WordPress is not up to scratch perhaps it might be an idea to make that clear on your site? Even something as simple as “experimental WordPress Support” or “Limited WordPress Support” would give people more realistic expectations and hence avoid disappointment.
The concept is sound, it just needs more work. It feels Alpha or Beta rahter than ready to be released to the world. Keep at it though, it has promise. If you release a new version that has better WordPress support and a more stable editor please let me know and I’ll give it another go.
Bart.
I tried Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer briefly with one of Google’s blogger.com blogs, seemed to work pretty good. I think it handles WordPress as well. I only looked at it very briefly, didn’t do much testing, but it might be worth a try. Presume you could run it with one of those emulators.