Ed's Tech Tips

I almost always have a network connection nearby so I have not played around with desktop blog editors much. In addition, the WYSIWYG editor built into my blog server software, LifeType, works very well which was not the case a few years ago. The editor is based on a open source Javascript editor called TinyMCE. It works across multiple platforms and web browsers. It is one of the few WYSISWYG editors that works as well with Apple's Safari web browser as it doe sin Firefox. However, this article is not about TinyMCE which you would only really be interested in if you are a web developer. This article is about Qumana, a free desktop blog editor. There are versions for Windows and Macs. It is written in Java.

There are not many free blog editors for the Mac. There are some commercial versions: iBlog, MacJournal and Ecto. Other free editors include the one built into Flock, a social web browser, and another called ScribeFire (previously Performancing), an extension for Firefox. While it could be useful to have the editors built into the browser they do not make adding photos very easy. You have to edit the HTML source code. While I know how to do it, I do not want to have to take the time to do so.

The photo above is one I shot at the Strawberries and Champagne party for graduating Seniors that is hosted by the Alumnae Association. I was able to easily insert the photo, align it, put a 5 pixel border around it and add a alt text description.

Qumana has the basic formatting tools and works with a wide variety of blogging platforms. Unfortunately, it cannot list my categories, but otherwise appears to work fairly well. The spell check as you type feature is handy.

If you want to make money with your blogs Qumana has an Ad service. You can sign up for an account and easily insert ads into your blog right from within the Qumana editor.

Post Publishing Notes: The article published without any issues to my blog from the Qumana editor. However, when I edited this article online, the picture was not aligned correctly and I had to edit the settings. It did appear correctly on the blog page. I also had to change the category. Despite a few minor gitches Qumana looks like a possible tool I can use when I do not have a network connection but I want to type a blog class.

The software that runs Mount Blog has recently been updated to version 1.2.2 of LifeType which is a free open source "blog platform." A blog platform is designed to host multiple blogs. If you want your own blog and you want it for free, check out WordPress.com or Blogger.com - these are the two most popular hosted blogging solutions. If you have your own server or hosting account and only want a single blog, then WordPress.org would probably be your best bet. However, if you want multiple blogs for your school, company or organization on your own web server that you can easily administer then check out LifeType. There is a good article on ProBlogger about choosing hosted or stand alone blogging software, unfortunately they do not mention LifeType, which is a shame, because it is one of the better freely available blogging platforms. There are commercial options, such as, TypePad and SixApart's MoveableType, but you have to pay for those. Other open source blogging platforms include PMachine, Greymatter, B2Evolution, TextPattern and Expression Engine (to name just a few). I reviewed a few of the others and LifeType came out on top for ease of use, flexiblity, features and documentation.

There is a multi-user version of WordPress called simply enough WordPress-MU which I assumed is used at WordPress.com, but each blog has it's own database tables which in my opinion does not appear to be very scalable (able to grow or expand) or as easy to administer - LifeType was built with the backend administrator in mind. There is another project called Lyceum which is based on WordPress, but uses a shared database backend designed to be very scalable. While it can use slightly modified WordPress templates (or Themes which are gorgeous) and plugins (which are many) the project is not nearly as active as LifeType, although it does look promising and I'll be keeping an eye on it.

The new version of LifeType has a wide variety of improvements which is a testimony to the commiment of the developers which are constantly improving LifeType and still manage to make it easy to upgrade from one version to another. The upgrade wizard was able to upgrade the backend database and nothing was lost in the process despite the numerous changes. When selecting an open source solution it is important that there is an active community behind the project, otherwise you won't have anyone to turn to when you need to assistance. LifeType has a wiki and an active forum. 

I will not attempt to list all of the improvements, but here are a few key new features in addition to the standard features it already has:

• Fine-grained user permission framework: Amber was asking me about being about to edit her own template and now she can without affecting anyone else.
• Bad-behavior integrated in the core: Bad-behavior is an effective anti-spam library and is now incorporated into the core of LifeType.
• Improved searches
• Improved administration and summary interface
• Global plugin settings framework
• "Partial" templates: This feature makes updating certain template components, such as, the comment form across multiple templates much easier. This has resulted in there not being as many ready made templates. Whereas there used to be 50, there are now about 13 because the developers focused on only improving th emost popular templates. This is really not bad because many of the ugly templates have been removed and creating new ones is not that difficult if you know CSS and the Smarty template system. This is the reason for my blog template change, which I like better than the old one.

Why does any of this matter? Hopefully, Mount Blog will be growing next year with the addition of class, club and possibly alumnae blogs along with the staff and student blogs we currently have. I'll keep you posted.