Thanks to various sources I have been upgrading my blogging experience quite a bit recently, and wanted to share what I’ve found with anyone who hasn’t heard of these yet. I primarily use Macs, so the following will mostly center on apps for that platform.

First, in the field of blog posting, I discovered Kung-Log. KL is a donationware Mac app that allows you to create blog entries more easily than by using Movable Type’s web page editor. This is not to put down MT’s editor–it is very well made and easy to use. Nor is it to say that KL allows you to control all aspects of your site, it can’t. But when entering the daily blog, it is a lot easier to use an independent app than to depend on a web page interface. It’s kind of like the difference between using a web page email account like Hotmail and using an email client like Eudora (try their beta version 6, it’s working well for me so far); the client is much faster and more flexible in many regards. So is KL.

With KL, you initially enter your blog’s URL, the user name and password, and it logs in automatically from then on. When you use the app, a nice Aqua-esque window with toolbar comes up, with a drawer for recent posts if you want to edit. Just type in the entry and its title and click on the Post button, and that’s it. But the real benefits come from the HTML coding and the image uploading.

There is an HTML menu in the toolbar that automatically inserts HTML code around whatever text you’ve selected. You can add code selections yourself, or modify what’s there; it even allows you to add hotkey commands. For example, I’ve added the hotkey “COMMAND-U” for adding a link. The link feature automatically grabs whatever URL is in the clipboard (that you’ve copied with CMD-C or -X) and puts it into the link.

Even better is the “Upload File” feature. When activated, a window comes up, and you just drag your photo into a frame in the window; a preview of the photo appears, and there are prompts for “arguments” at the right–for example, what kind of border and spacing, alignment, and so on you want. When you click “upload,” it not only uploads the file (a la FTP) to your blog’s image folder, but it also adds the HTML code to link to the photo within the blog entry! Very cool stuff.

You can save drafts on your computer on the fly to avoid having your work wiped in case of a crash (faster than on the web page). You can edit recent entries, ping URLs, and even have KL automatically add to your post what music you’re listening to in iTunes when you post. And there is spell-checking, a very badly missed feature in the web page editor. The program also allows “previews,” but they do not show correct formatting; perhaps this will improve in future releases.

That said, I did have a problem, which may or may not have been related to KL. After using it for a few days, I suddenly started getting error messages when I tried to post, saying “permission denied.” The error messages even prevented me from posting via the web page interface; I could save files and edit them, but I was denied permission whenever I tried to rebuild the indexes so the changes would appear on the site. I was able to get past the problem with a few fixes suggested at the MT forums. For all I know, the errors had nothing to do with KL, but they happened when I was using KL. The errors were easily fixed, though.

In the meantime, it looks like a good app, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for these features. I plan to keep trying it out, and hope it’ll prove itself over time.

For those using Windows, aside from my sympathies, I would suggest trying W. Bloggar freeware.