4 Desktop Blogging Applications For Writers

If you just write the occasional blog post, then WordPress/Blogger default editor is fine, especially since its recent update. But if you are like me and write several pieces each week (or sometimes even each day), then TinyMCE’s quirks can begin to grate. If your income depends on the content you’re writing, it’s not wise to trust browser based writing environments  it’s more than likely that nothing will go wrong, but I’ve experienced too many accidental refreshes and otherwise disappearing content to entrust my productivity to a web-based editor.

Thankfully, I don’t have to. There are plenty of desktop applications that integrate well with WordPress, allowing bloggers to write and publish their content without ever looking at the blogger admin dashboard. In this article, I’d like to take a look at my favorites.

Byword / Marked Application

When I’m working on a Mac, the combination of the Byword text editor and the Marked markdown previewer is by far my favorite writing environment. I’ll focus on Byword here, but Marked has some very useful features, including link validation, keyword highlighting, readability statistics, and the ability to show previews with user-supplied CSS scripts.

Byword is a text editor. On the face of it, Byword is a very simple application. For me, that’s a great thing. I just want to sit down and type, but, although it looks simple, Byword actually quite feature-rich — with exactly the right features, too. Byword uses Markdown for formatting, which is a straightforward markup language that anyone can learn in an hour — and they should: it makes a huge difference to the writing experience and productivity. Byword offers excellent Markdown support, with easy-to-remember keyboard shortcuts for adding titles, links, lists, and so on.

But Byword wouldn’t deserve palace on this list if it couldn’t publish to WordPress. In fact, Byword can publish to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Evernote. Publishing is a Premium feature, but it’s not expensive and well-worth the price to omit the cut-and-paste-into-Wordpress stage of blogging.
Because Byword is available for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone, users can publish from anywhere.

Marsedit desktop blog editor

This is another tool for the Mac users out there. I couldn’t write a post about desktop blogging software without including Marsedit, the blogging tool of choice for many, including John Gruber, creator of Markdown, although Marsedit does brilliantly with Rich Text too.

Byword is an excellent text editor for writers, but Marsedit is a full-fledged blog editing tool, which is compatible with WordPress, Tumblr, Typepad and dozens of other content management systems. It features excellent media support, with one-click image insertion from a variety of sources. If you like, you can even integrate your favorite text editor with Marsedit, including BBEdit and TextMate.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is getting a little long in the tooth, but it’s still the best Windows tool for publishing to WordPress. It offers many of the same features as Marsedit, except without the Markdown support. If you’re a WordPress blogger who prefesr to work in a Windows environment, Windows Live Writer should be your first port of call.

Blogilo Editor

Last, but certainly not least, is a tool for our friends who prefer the Linux desktop. Blogilo features a WYSIWYG and HTML editor, with previewing that matches your blog’s style. Users can create, modify, and delete posts, as well as schedule publication.

These four are my favorites, but they’re far from the only options. What do you use? Let us know in the comments below.