Using a decent blog editor

Let's face it, Blooger's editor for posts is, er, well.. "lacking" -- ok, it sucks! There, I've said it....

There are so many shortcomings with it that there's no point in listing them all here, but suffice to say that having a tiny editing window is not the most enticing UI for an editor that anyone could think of. And, don't get me started with the crazy use of <span> tags all over the place, the massive mess-up that happen when moving from the Rich Text editing to HTML editing and back, etc. etc.

The real issue with the built-in editor, has been the near-impossibility to properly format the 'code' sections (usually by means of a <pre> tag) without that being messed up by the over-zealous <span>ning thing....

Ecto

So, I'm typing this one entry right now with ecto, and, if I try to enter a class MyClass code snippet below:

public class MyClass {
public aMethod(String aString) {
return "this is lame";
}
}

this should Just Work.

But, as you can see above, It Just Doesn't.... moving back from the HTML editor, the 'beginning-of-line' spaces get stripped out, despite them being between <pre> tags.

Oh, well, on to looking for something else -- stay tuned!

Update: this is actually even worse than it appeared at first: for some unknown reason (but most likely, lousy programming skills...) when you edit a post, ecto adds a bunch of <br /> tags, just after each closing </p> tag, thus adding extra lines: there is absolutely no way of getting rid of them; even manually deleting them, they get added back up.
I had eventually had to manually 'fix' this entry in Blogger's native editor (so, it turns out, it's not so bad after all :-)

Avoid.

Flock

So I moved on to flock, a much more fully-fledged browser-type, with lots of features, gadgets, etc.
Looks a bit daunting at first sight, but by clicking randomly and probing around, it's pretty easy to get started and it took me less than five minutes to figure out how to sign on my blogger account and get started editing.



The editor looks decent, with several options for fonts and other gadgetry, and I'll be now trying the usual trick with some code snippet, defining a new exciting LameClass that doesNothing() but with flair:

public class LameClass {
  public void doesNothing() {
    Sytem.out.println("with flair!");
  }
}

And flock works offline too:
I'm typing this on the train, without internet connection.

It is definitely friendly enough, and I will be using it for a while to see whether it works as advertised.

Blogged with the Flock Browser