Everyone who knows me well knows exactly what I feel about free and open source software kicking Microsoft's ass. So today, when I couldn't find a decent desktop blogging client for my fedora-gnome desktop after searching for 2 hours, I was completely frustrated. The thought of a windows-lover earning bragging rights for having a better blogging client was unacceptable! My best hopes were in blokkal, but I had to allow Kwallet to run in my gnome desktop for blokkal to be able to do its thing.

A kde program doing something gnome can't do is sad. But a kde win over my beloved gnome is still better than a windows win over foss!

And so, here I am, posting this from blokkal.

And to those of you who care to read about my horrible experiences with Linux desktop blogging clients, here is a list of clients I tried and what went wrong with them:

1. Drivel: The last update on their website was in 2006. That project looked dead.

2. gnome-blog: A package was not available in my fedora 14 repos. I downloaded the source but got stuck right at the ./configure stage. I was in no mood to go through a dependency hell all over again.

3. Blogilo: I can't believe a Google search for "Linux blogger clients" still gives results for "bilbo blogger" on the first page, while "blogilo" was nowhere to be seen. I am not sure when the name was changed to blogilo but, something must be terribly wrong if Google didn't show it in the first page of results. Anyway, Blogilo was available in a fedora repo, and the installation was smooth. But it simply refused to fetch my blog id and I was not able to configure my blog settings.

4. Thingamablog: Not for blogger!

5. BloGTK and BloGTK 2.0: Wow this was the biggest nightmare of the lot! BloGTK refused to even start on my fedora 14. BloGTK 2.0 does not exist in my fedora repos, so I had to install it manually. Installation was pretty smooth. Configuring my blog account was also pretty easy. So far so good. The problem started when I tried to pull some old posts from my blog. BloGTK failed here, and gave an error message. I googled the error message and found that it was a python bug and BloGTK was merely a victim of this bug. However, I was happy to see that this error message was also noted as a bug by the BloGTK folks. Hopefully they'll come around with a fix pretty soon. Meanwhile, someone reported that it was still possible to post new blog entries, the bug was affecting only retrieval of old posts.
Right now, BloGTK 2.0 is barely usable, but is probably the best bet on a decent gnome desktop blog client.

6. Blokkal: This is something that finally did work for me. Its not great, but it works. Finally!

Yes, there is that firefox plugin '"scribefire", but I'm not a huge firefox fan.

What I really want to see is a nice clean GNOME blog client that has the most essential features and supports all the common protocols. Right now, BloGTK 2.0 looks very promising. If you can hack python, and you love bloggers writing on FOSS software, go help these guys out. If you can't write code, you can still help by submitting bug reports or giving them a pat on the back and say "Good job. Keep up the nice work", or blogging about them to spread the word about the nice work they are doing. (This applies to all the blog clients mentioned here, not just BloGTK).

Anyway, it feels good to be back on the blogosphere. New year's coming soon. One new year's resolution is definately going to be "Blog MORE!".


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Update: Blokkal sucks too... It can't handle newlines! In the end, I had to log into the web UI and fix things by hand.
This is a black day for free software bloggers. :-(