A long while ago now I said I was going to review some blogging clients. I never really made a “final decision” but I did arrive at a default: Qumana.
The other two clients in the running were w.bloggar and ecto.
Basically i discarded ecto pretty much straight away – it was doing weird formatting things and I wasn’t about to keep using a client that needed me to then go clean everything up on MoveableType after posting every time.
w.bloggar, my previous default, does some things well. But its not really in the game if you want to start adding photos and stuff. it felt like it was designed just for text. Now I am a big fan of text, and the written word, but it should be easy to add images and so on to your blogs. And richer formattting. Finally w.bloggar is just not predicated on WYSIWYG.
Which brings me to Qumana, which is about what you see and get.
The notion of a Workpad where I can drop links and images and so on is really helpful. Many blogs are works in progress until you find the killer link or news event or whatever to hang the blog on. Its a bit like investigative journalism – you marshall facts so you can drop them when the time is right. Qumana offers a place to manage all this material. Having said that, it doesnt seem to handle memory that well- you can expect the client to slow down a little as the WorkPad grows in size. You need to chuck out older files to keep it lean and responsive.
One of the nice things about Qumana is the initial experience, in terms of firing content to MoveableType or typepad or whatever. It handles the password setting and all that stuff automagically, which is good.
There are some things that drive me nuts though. Worst is the fact you can’t call down a blog entry for editing once you posted it. Yeah yeah I know you’re not supposed to change blog entries once they are posted… But if facts need correcting, or names spellings are wrong, or even if you want to make an edit/with a throughstroke, you may well want to pull an already posted blog down to your client. Qumana doesn’t offer that function, so its over to MT. I have even been known to pull a posting down to w.bloggar, which does this simply and with no fuss, in order to edit an already posted entry.
One weird thing about Qumana – while its posting to the server it locks up. The posting will appear on monkchips and yet the client is still engaged for sometime afterwards.
But all in all the experience is reasonable. Qumana is my blogging client for now. But they need to hurry with some new functions. If some other client can provide autocompletion of regularly used links, for example, then I will likely jump on it. I just want to type Udell, not some url all the time.
So I am going steady with Qumana, but I am keeping an eye on the field.
Gary Potter says:
September 21, 2005 at 7:09 pm
If only there were one that could peacefully coexist with our company firewall. This one doesn’t, dang it.
Sumit Chachra says:
September 21, 2005 at 7:40 pm
Does Qumana have a mac version… don’t think so ?
Ecto on mac seems pretty reasonable and runs perfectly with WordPress for me…
Tris Hussey says:
September 21, 2005 at 9:10 pm
James … have you tried the latest version of Qumana? We’ve made several improvements including edit old posts in all platforms that support that feature (MT is one of them). We’ve also worked out many other bugs (like server time outs).
Gary … Qumana does have firewall support, I’ll ping you to help.
Sumit … cat’s out of the bag. We’re working on it.
Tris Hussey says:
September 21, 2005 at 9:10 pm
BTW … James, thank you very much!
Gordon Haff says:
September 21, 2005 at 9:54 pm
When I last tried Qumana, it looked nice but had a critical weakness (for me). There didn’t see any way to post drafts. This isn’t a big deal for my personal blog but was a showstopper for our Illuminata Perspectives blog because 1.) some posts get posted as drafts pending approval/review by someone else and 2.) I sometimes want to put something up as a draft until an NDA embargo lifts at which point I can publish quickly.
Nigel Fortlage says:
September 22, 2005 at 3:07 am
James, thanks for this post, I will be giving Qumana a try for my blogging posts, although as Gordon says, it would be great to add support for draft postings.
Tris Hussey says:
September 22, 2005 at 6:39 am
We’re working on draft postings. In the meantime, what you can do is save to html and re-open later. It’s what I often do for embargoes or offline blogging.
Tris Hussey says:
September 22, 2005 at 5:15 pm
James, on further thought I think you’re using what we used to call QumanaPro. We aren’t continuing to develop on QPro. Qumana (once called QumanaLE) is the flagship now. Give it a try, it is a lot better than QPro.
Nigel Fortlage says:
September 24, 2005 at 4:54 pm
James, this is for Tris if she is following this thread, I use jroller for blogging, can’t sem to get the LE product to talk to it. How do I go about getting some assistance?
Marcel den Hartog says:
September 26, 2005 at 6:29 pm
hey nigel did you see ibm is now supporting roller. elias torres is the man with a plan
Marcel den Hartog says:
September 26, 2005 at 6:38 pm
i am using LE already. what version you at now? i am running 2.1.034
James Governor says:
September 27, 2005 at 5:32 pm
weird – i turned into marcel somehow. the last two questions/suggestions were mine.