Blogging with Zoundry Raven

To make my blogging life easier, I have been looking into a couple of free offline blogging editors. Looked at, among others, Ecto (for Windows) (a version is still available here), Qumania, w.Bloggar, Windows Live Writer, and Zoundry Raven. Raven seemed to be the most fitting for me. It has a nice editor, and nice blog management features. The editor is claimed to be WYSIWYG, but that is only true in preview mode - where editing is not possible. The editing window does not show my blog according to the template. However, by selecting an editor font close enough to the one used in my template, editing is WYSIAWYG. Good enough for me.

When I installed Raven, it refused to download posts, templates, and such from my log. Contacted the Zoundry guys, and they were very helpful and responsive in solving the problem. I now have a working Raven offline blog editor, and am very happy with it.

One thing to note is that, even though my local timezone is configured correctly in Raven, I have to manually set the posting time to 9 less than local time to avoid the post being scheduled for posting 9 hours after I post it from Raven. This is not a problem in Raven, as it converts the time to UTC in he correct XML date-time format (checked with the Charles Web Debugging Proxy, a very nice tool). It looks like our Roller server does not convert the UTC time correctly to its local timezone, but keeps the time and date unchanged. Because I live 9 hours in the future, from our server's perspective, my posts are scheduled for later posting, unless I set the date-time manually. And therefore that is what I do.

Another note is about tags. The blogs.sun.com web site has its own tagging mechanism. This mechanism is not supported in the MetaWebLog API does not support this tagging mechanism. I came to the same conclusion as David G. Simmons, and have given up the use of tags until a mechanism becomes available where I can set them up in Raven.

Posted at 11:00AM Aug 22, 2008 by marjo in Blogging  |  Comments[0]