Software Review - Bleezer Blogging Client

Being a traffic whore, I simply can’t leave well enough alone. This post comes to you courtesy of Bleezer, a Java-based, cross-platform capable (supposedly) blog client editor. It’s kind of like Windows Live Writer, but will work with Linux and Mac as well as Windows. So they say.

Right out of the gate I get error messages indicating the server can’t be contacted. WTF? I tried both the configurations available for WordPress, and the New Blogger settings. I gave it my user name and password accurately. But it still gives me the error message every time I launch it. And, it took forever to shut down too. It hung before telling me it thinks I have a problem with my network.

I’m not sure what the problem might be, but after the fiasco I just went through this past weekend with my computer, I’m not interested in fighting with Bleezer to make it work. I’ll stick with WLW while I’m running Windows, but dang. Not having a blogging client on Linux is, to quote Benticore from Epic Black Villainy, going to suck rotting donkey scrote. Picture that and sleep easy.

Bleezer’s set up is pretty simple; download a ZIP file, extract it to a folder, run the .jar file (NOT the .exe file). The system on which you run the program will need Java, so if you don’t have it installed for some reason, you’ll need to do that before it will work.

Bleezer has some bugs and quirks that make it … well, buggy and quirky. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to like ordinary things that other programs do. For instance, the ENTER key seems to cause Bleezer to skip more than one line. The annoying loss of line breaks and spacing right in the middle of posting has made life … interesting while doing this review. I did manage to get my categories into Bleezer (in actuality it did it all by itself, without asking me about it), but it shows me more than one row of check boxes and I’m not altogether sure which ones I’m supposed to use. It inserts the Technorati tags I ask for, but I can’t control where they go in the post or even if they’re left or right aligned. THAT’S annoying, too.

Bleezer takes a minute to launch — that’s probably the JVM starting up — but once it’s going it’s fast and lightweight. The cursor lags a tiny bit when I’m typing, and I know for a fact I’m not that fast a typist. The interface seems clear enough, if a bit spartan.

That’s all fine, I don’t have a problem with that. But it’s glitchy as all get-out. The image insertion is funky and doesn’t always do what I expect it to do. Removing and editing image properties is much more difficult than just clicking on the picture and altering it’s properties. As of this writing, I still have no idea how to do that. I can’t, for instance, change the size of the inserted image above. I’ll have to edit it in WP’s editor and hope for the best after publishing. So, unless you know what the dimensions in pixels of the image you want to insert should be to look right in your post, forget it. Bleezer lacks the drag resize handles of other Windows-compliant programs, so you’re stuck with whatever shows up unless you edit it manually after posting.

It’s also buggy in editing mode. I’m having a hard time inserting line breaks to add paragraphs and removing them is worse. The spacing gets so screwed up I have to delete the following paragraphs and re-enter them. That absolutely stinks.

I don’t recommend Bleezer unless you’re desperate for a blog client. If you’re a Windows user, you’re still going to have a hard time topping Windows Live Writer. Sorry to tell you. It’s a big program, slows things down, but it works like a champ every time. I’ve never had a problem with it, even when I thought I did. I recommend that for Windows users.

But, for Mac and Linux usesrs, what alternatives do you have? I’ll be sampling Qumana next, but it only does Mac and Windows, I think. I don’t remember a generic Unix download. I’ll post more about that when I do the review. I did one earlier this year, but it was in comparison to WLW, and that’s just not fair. I’ll review Qumana on its own and let you all know what I find.

If anyone out there is using Linux or Mac and running a blog client, let me know which one it is. I hear a lot of mixed things about ScribeFire, which is a Firefox plug-in, but it’s at least reliable. Those of us with more than one blog to post to really don’t want to deal with having to type our posts in multiple windows and copying and pasting into blog service editors is a crap shoot at best.

Sound off and let me know.

-JDT-

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