WordPress Desktop Client Search – Bleezer Review

Well there is another Blog Desktop Client on the block. It’s name is Bleezer.

This software is a little different the your average program as clicking on the .exe file in the download folder actually launches the program as opposed to installing it. I guess this would have it’s advantages as you would be able to put this software on a USB key and run it from any computer (it would go great with your WordPress on a Stick for Meeting Notes).

The initial running of the program gives you a pop up message that you do not have any blogs accounts configured and tells you where to go to set them up. The setup is pretty straight forward as in if you have setup one desktop client you know what goes where. Part of the setup prompts for ftp information for image upload so it does not take advantage of the xmlrpc image upload feature in WordPress. This matters to some people and not to others.

My initial feelings of the application was that it is pretty well laid out but a lot of the drop downs and text boxes in the top menu section are butted up right next to each other. There is a lot of space available up there so I think they should of used it. Also, the text in the Editor pane is right on the edge – it needs some space there. There is also a Preview pane to see how your text is formated. Finally there is a text box for adding Technorati links.

Initially I expected this to be WYSIWYG but much to my dismay it is like w.Bloggar in that your HTML tags are in-line with your text. Not my personal preference. In fact that is why I started looking for a new editor – I did not like that about w.Bloggar, and did not like that about this one either.

In regards to images – everything is manual. You have to create your own thumbnail and then it is uploaded via ftp. Unfortunately the Preview pane does not display the picture properly. It puts a place holder but the image size is not correct. It also does not take on the correct “align” attribute so you really do not get a good sense of how the picture is going to look in your post. I did not actually upload an image in a post so I do not know how well that works.

In regards to lists (my big thing – I’m a “list” type of guy – you don’t want to get on my list ).

• Clicking the unordered list gives you the ul and li beginning and end tags.
  But then you need to add your additional li tags in manually
• item 2
• item 3

I started off using Bleezer to do this post but stopped half way through because it was just to much work to get it look the way I wanted (typing in all those tags manually is a pain! ).

Other observations I made were –

• No ability to post a a draft
• When you hit save it prompts you for a location to save the post, when you hit save again it prompts you again and goes back to the original screen (not where you originally saved it).
• No documentation – the help menu just has “about” could not find anything on their site either
• Spell check was not the greatest. The first word that came up “misspelled” was blog (it was spelled correctly but was not in Bleezer’s dictionary). It also spell checked the HTML tags so of course everyone of those was coming up.

I do not know the motivation behind the product since there are several different free clients available already (Zoundry and Qumana both are promoting their advertising programs). Speaking of advertising, they did the big no-no IMO – they added their little “Powered by Bleezer” automatically at the bottom of the post and I could not find a way to get rid of it.

So as you may have guessed this is not the type of editor that I would prefer using. It is similar to w.Bloggar in functionality but I think that functionality is lacking. I think it would need some work before it could be considered for any serious blogging.

Technorati : Bleezer, Blog, Blog Desktop Clients, BlogJet, Blogging, Desktop Blogging, Desktop Client, Qumana, WordPress, Zoundry