Free Desktop Blogging Clients

By Jamie | March 23, 2006

If you blog on a daily basis you should check out a offline or desktop blogging client to make things even easier for yourself. They work a little like word processing program like MS Word or web editor like Frontpage or Dreamweaver, and in fact if you use Blogger.com check out this plug-in for Word. http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html

Anyway as I was saying the clients act like a word processor allowing you to format, save posts locally to your machine, edit old posts, post to multiple blogs, insert pictures, back date posts and spell check your posting. Best of all they are a lot quicker than logging into your blogger via a browser. All the clients below are free and I've found one for each operating system:-

Flock Web Browser - Not a true standalone client but all in one Web 2.0 client which works on all operating systems. Still in early beta so maybe worth checking out in May 06 when a stable release is due.
Qumana - A freeware client for both Mac and Windows operating system. I've tried both the beta and version 2 on Windows and it's not bad for freebie. Includes uploading of files automatically, can cope with multiple blog accounts. The only draw back being you can't back date postings. The beta did crash a number of times when trying to write up this post, arh! Having said that I still use it with along with Semagic.
Semagic - One of the first blogging clients I've used and still do today. Its quality product that can be found on the open source SourceForge web site but only for Windows. Lacks some features for managing old postings, can't upload files and setting up multiple blog accounts isn't the smoothest operation.
W.Bloggar - Freeware application for the Windows platform only. Similar to Semagic but only HTML editing mode which is rather poor when the whole idea of the blogging client is to make things simple. Semagic allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and HTML.
Thingamablog - An opensource application which can run on all platforms. It does look rather good with lots of well laid out features especially if you host your own blog site. If your not hosting it yourself, it becomes rather complicated. So much so I couldn't get it to work with blogger.com which is a shame. Leave a comment if you know all the FTP/API settings for Blogger.com.
BlogniX - One for the Linux people, haven't tried it myself but I'm sure it does the job.
Deepest Sender - Extension for Firefox that allows integrated blogging within the browser. You can run it from within Tools drop down menu or right click on a page to blog it. Only recently discovered this client so can't comment too much on it, but looks like its worth a try.