While I was checking the weblog of the uruguayan web design studio “studio.st“, I found out that there is a nice and simple blogging tool called w.bloggar (people of studio.st are using it in conjunction with blogger in order to feed their nicely laid design with content, though they opted for wordpress for their weblog).
W.bloggar is a windows based freeware blogging client that acts like an interface between you and your blogging system. This means that you could write and organize your blog entries offline and publish them whenever you want/could just with a click (and on more than one blog if you want). It is very efficient and time-saving tool as it is designed for blog publishing and it offers more than doing the same thing on notepad and pasting your entry in the post editor of your blogging service..
It has a long feature list but the software itself is simple and intuitive. Besides writing new blog entries, what yields this blogging a great help and powerful are options like the ability to edit already published posts, edit your blog template, spellchecking of your posts, ping option and an account wizard that helps you register and administrate several blog services. Also it permits the bloggers to make use of gimmicks like this :
[Listening to: Love Will Tear Us Apart –
Joy Division – Substance 1977-1980 (03:28)]
, which is a cooperation between w.bloggar and windows media blogging plug-in (more info here) , but in my opinion this is the least.
W.bloggar recognizes lots of blogging services and blog management systems like blogger, wordpress, movable type, typepad, Drupal, .Text etc.. You could check the whole list of supported blog tools and services in their faq page to see if this works for you. (Although this list is long, unfortunately it seems that there is no plan to publish it on Mac and Linux, but I will try it on Linux with Wine HQ and make it known if it works or not..) (update: unfortunately I could not make it work with Wine HQ on Suse 9.1)
My short experience with w.bloggar is very positive. As ecto software did not even work at all on our and my friends’ windows pcs, I am not able to make a contrasted evaluation. It was a bit frustrating with ecto which was totally the opposite of my current euphory due to my recent discovery of w.bloggar. I also read positive commentaries on Ecto, especially from the author of problogger.net (and several other blogs), Darren Rowse who mentioned it during his interview with Susannah Gardner. He seems to publish some dozens of blog entries a day on his blogs and ecto tool seems to assist his inspiration efficiently.