Just for kicks, to see if it’s any eas­ier than using a plain old web browser to inter­face with the blog!

Any­way, BloGTK is a desk­top client for Word­Press which runs on Linux sys­tems. Nig­gly fea­tures I’ve dis­cov­ered in the last 30 seconds:

• Can’t select text, then click the “hyper­link” icon, and have the anchor tags wrap around selected text — they appear to the right of it.
• Com­pul­sory “tar­get” field in anchor gen­er­a­tion — which I don’t think (if I recall cor­rectly) is even valid in XHTML 1.1, pos­si­bly earlier.
• Lack of built-in quick tags that Word­Press’ own post­ing inter­face has, namely for unordered lists, list items, and tag­ging of abbre­vi­a­tions, etc.
• Iron­i­cally, it’s pos­si­ble to define your own tags, which can wrap around selected text just fine, whilst the “built-in” anchor but­ton doesn’t do this… Hmm, okay.

It’s really lit­tle things, noth­ing major — the for­mat­ting tags (strong, em, etc.) work just fine on selec­tions, which is great. It also has an inbuilt pre­view which (I’m 99% sure) func­tions using an inter­nal ren­der­ing engine (or part of the GTK toolkit, same thing), rather than mak­ing HTTP calls. A change that’d be inter­est­ing to see (although one which doesn’t affect me directly) would be the imple­men­ta­tion of either a WYSIWYG edi­tor, or sim­ply Tex­tile or Mark­down sup­port with XML­HttpRe­quest being used (or some­thing like it? I gather that’s a JavaScript thing, not hav­ing ever used it, so it mayn’t be usable like that.

Another thing that’d be nice is the imple­men­ta­tion of key­board short­cuts, just for text for­mat­ting stuff — so, Ctrl + B for strong and em tags, etc. And also the chang­ing of the cat­e­gory dis­play to a list of check­boxes in its own frame (or what­ever the term is in desk­top app inter­face design lingo) on the right of the post­ing area, instead of a drop­down — that’d allow posters to select mul­ti­ple cat­e­gories, more rapidly.

It’s a good sim­ple app (sorry… I know it’s prob­a­bly rather unsim­ple when you look at the code dri­ving behind it, but I don’t under­stand any of that Python stuff, so I’m just judg­ing on the inter­face), but a few nig­gly things mean I’d still pre­fer to use the native Word­Press web interface.

Edit: In part to see if it does, but also because I had another thought — the absence of a “Post­ing…” sta­tus win­dow is also some­thing which could be improved, just so the user doesn’t think the appli­ca­tion has crashed. It took a while here due to my ISP’s poor DNS per­for­mance, and had I not known why it was going slowly, I may have closed the appli­ca­tion think­ing it had crashed.