Zoundry (Reviewed)

Installation & Configuration

It has to be said that Zoundry Blog Writer is a very nice little application. I’ve used it to post several entries on A View From The West and it has done the job very well. So far I have found only one minor niggle, more of which later. For now, I’ll get on and give you a flavour of what the application is like.

The obvious place to start is with installation and configuration. The installation was a snap, no problems at all with the installer. It’s a reasonably small package as well so doesn’t take much time to download and has little impact on your hard disk space. Configuration is likewise straight-forward. There’s a wizard which runs first time you start the program and, provided you already have a blog, you tell the program the blogs URL, provide your account details and it does the rest. It accesses your blog, and downloads any posts that are already there, then you’re ready to go and you can start composing and posting blogs direct from your desktop.

Using The Interface

The interface provides all the formatting tools that you are likely to need. You get all the usual tools such as bold, italics, underline, strike-through, bullets and numbering, text justification, change case, insert an image, insert a web link, and more – all accessible from tool-bar buttons. There are also buttons for adding block-quote and code formatting, which are very useful for blogs like this one.

As well as formatting, the interface allows you to switch between a design and XHTML view of your post. Most of the time the design interface works well for me as there’s nothing more useful when typing than seeing everything in WYSIWYG form. Of course you do need to delve into the code every once in a while so having the option to do so is great.

Should you need to, the interface also allows you to change the date and time of your post. You can also choose a category for your post – provided the blog service you are using supports categories (the application picks up the list of categories you have specified on your blog). There are also options for setting tag words (a la Technorati, del.icio.us, etc) and trackbacks for your post. As if that wasn’t enough, there is also a Preview tab that lets you have a sneak peak at how your post should look when posted (in a basic kind of way).

Posting A Blog Entry

Once you’ve used all these features to compose your post, you’ll no doubt want to publish it on your blog. This application does this with the click of a button.

Actually, depending on the settings you have chosen, it’s a few clicks but when you see why all the extra clicking makes sense.

First stop after clicking the publish button is the spell checker (if enabled using Tools / Settings from the menu and picking the Spelling entry in the Settings dialogue). This is a very useful pause on the route to publication as there is nothing worse than a badly spelld blog bost.

Next, you are presented with the Post Entry dialogue which is made up of several tabs: General; Tags; Weblog Ping; Trackbacks, and; Log. This gives you a chance to review various post settings such as which blog you want to post to, whether you want to post as a draft, which categories to post under, etc.

You can also go to the Weblog Ping tab and choose which weblogs to ping in order to announce your latest post to the world. Once all that is done you can finally click the Post button and watch as your entry wings its way to your blog.

Other Things To Note

As I discovered when writing this post, this program will also upload the images that you include when you publish to your blog service (if it supports doing this – WordPress seems to do so quite happily), copying them directly from your local hard disk. Alternatively, you can use a Media Repository which allows you to link directly to images, podcasts, etc., stored on an FTP server. I haven’t tried this out yet but will update this entry if I do.

You can post an entry to more than one blog. This is very useful for the novice as you don’t need to worry about using a different editor interface for each blog that you write. It also saves you having to log onto several different sites and muck about with cut & paste when you do want to post the same entry several times. Very user friendly!

Problems?

Overall, I’m finding that the Zoundry Blog Writer is a very reliable tool for posting blog entries with. Every once in a while it throws up the occasional formatting hiccup which means that things don’t look quite the way you expect them to when you view the post on your blog. However, I haven’t found anything that couldn’t be quickly sorted by using the blog’s on-line editor or by making a minor change withing Zoundry itself, using the XHTML view of the post.

The problem I most often have is when I write to A View From The West, which is hosted by Blogger. When I look at entries there that I have posted using Zoundry an extra bit of whitespace appears between the post title and body. I sort this by simply opening the entry on-line to edit it and clicking the Publish Post button without making any changes to the post at all. Then when I return to look at the post the extra space is gone.

The other problem area I’ve encountered is to do with the positioning of images within a blog post. So far I’ve resolved these by tweaking the IMG tag using the XHTML view. I have a fair bit of experience of working with raw HTML so I’ve not been bothered too much by this however this could be a bit more awkward for novice users.

None of these very minor niggles have put me off using Zoundry and I can see myself using it more often in the future. As you can see from the Zoundry web site, the application is (at the time of writing this) still in beta development so there’s every likelihood that these issues will be ironed out in future releases. You’ll also find some pretty good documentation by visiting the site, along with support forums that I’ve found useful when starting to use the program and when writing this post.

In Conclusion

This is a very nice application and it makes composing and publishing blog entries very easy. It also supports a wide and growing range of blogging services including Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, and Typepad (to name the obvious ones). You get all the formatting and publishing tools you are likely to need and can post each entry to more than one blog using one desktop-based interface. It is also very easy to set up and quick to operate. You can also store copies of all your blog posts, past and present, on your home PC.

Final Score: An easy 4 out of 5. Go to the top of the class!

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