Another attempt at finding the right tool to blog
I thought that I have found the ultimate tool, after a lot of research, so I ended up by the most expensive Ulysses. As of writing this post, it’s going for about $39.99 a year. It’s lot, but has some great features… which had all of them… except for one that I forgot to check for… Tables
Looked at Ai Writer, but you couldn’t attach images. They only support embedded images that point to a link.
Requirements
- Single-Pane of glass – didn’t want to use a bunch of different tools to accomplish one things, make blog posts.
- Need to be able to export to other formats like MS Word, Plain Text, PDF and such
- Need to be able to publish directly to WordPress
- Need to support copying and pasting of images
- For example, if you take a screenshot, it gets stored in your clipboard. I didn’t want to save it as an image, find a folder, come up with a fancy unique name. Doing all of that would take me away from writing
- With that said, it has to support Markdown. Using this format, as I am currently with Blogo, allows the writer to get words out, keep fingers on keyboard and make constant progress.
- Ability to cloud Sync between iOS and MacOS applications
- Finally, Tables, this is only mentioned because its a real pain to be able to compare things without them. See Below:
Markdown Table Test – Failed
App Name | Tables
————— | ————
Blogo | Yes
HTML Table Test
For this test I used Typora I used this tool to be able to copy and paste as a specific format, like text, HTML, or Markdown.
| App Name | Single-Pane of Glass | Export MS Word, Plain Text, PDF | Publish to WordPress | Pasting of Images | Support MarkDown | iCloud Sync | Tables | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blogo | No | No | Yes | No, but can upload them once dragged in | Yes | Yes | No, just HTML | Free, for one blog |
| Ulysses | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | $39.99 a year |
| Ai Writer | No | Yes | Yes | No, can only embed | Yes | Yes | Yes | $29.99 |
Verdict
I think the jury is still out. Not sure why there isnt a program that cannot do all of this. If there was. I would buy it.
Blogo
I really like the program for blogging. You have access to almost everything you do if you were logged into your admin site and posting.
- Add/create Categories/tags to your post
- Add New posts or Even update previously posted posts (that was fun to say in my head)
- Preview
- Simple looking interface
What is seems to lack though is:
- Not being able to export to other documents types, so you are sort of stuck with what you type in this program.
- No tables
- Preview is buggy as well
- Its also a little buggy as I am typing. Sometimes I had to hit “Save” to be able to continue to type, but it wasnt obvious that thats what I should do or docuemented.
- Not being able to organize a large post. Having the ablity to move pieces around as you are brain storming a post in a nice to have feature.
I think if the export features were there and the tables, Id be all in for blogging.
