Surf the Mind

If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you’ve probably experimented with some external blogging clients.  I’ve tried a number of them over the years, yet always seem to go right back to WordPress’ admin when I want to post.

But for the next little while, I’m going to experiment once again and give the various blogging clients a try. After all, they do have a lot going for them… from spell checking, browser integration, and the ability to blog to multiple accounts without opening a new browser window.

Today I installed Deepest Sender, a blogging client for Firefox.

Deepest Sender installs like any Firefox plug-in. Its effortless and comfortable for anyone who has ever added plug-ins to their Firefox installations before. This also means that updates will happen effortlessly, as Firefox will prompt you when new updates are available.

Once you’ve installed Deepest Sender and restarted Firefox, you’ll need to set up some accounts in Deepest Sender. To begin, start the editor by either using the Deepest Sender menu item from the Tools menu,  or typing CTRL+\ on your keyboard.

You’ll be prompted through a very easy new account wizard to set up your first Blog. Deepest Sender will work with LiveJournal, Blogger and WordPress blogs, and should be adaptable to any other platform that uses the metaWeblog API.

Once you’ve set up your blog, you can log in and make a test post. You”ll notice that unlike many other blog editing tools, this one doesn’t leave unasked for links at the end of your posts. Yay!

From the main editor window, you can see your post in either WYSIWYG format, which is “Normal”, in Source mode, which will show you all your tags, and in Preview mode, which will show you, hopefully, what your finished post will truly look like, title and all.

You can choose  which category you want to place your post in from the drop down box at the upper right.

Adding posts to your blog is very straightforward. Simply type away, adding links and text styles with the built-in editor, then post.

Deepest Sender does not yet have a way to upload an image from the editor to your blog. It only accepts the image URL when you choose the image icon from the toolbar,  so if you want to use an image in your post, you’ll need to make sure it’s already online somewhere.

My only other complaint is that Deepest Sender does not include a way to add tags to your posts. I rely heavily on tags, and adding relevant tags to posts has greatly increased my search engine rankings for many keywords, so I am loathe to give them up.

In summary:

Pros:

• Fast and easy install and upgrades
• Offline editing ability
• Access to all your blogs from one place
• Nice WYSIWYG editor
• No extra advertising or links added to your posts
• Free!

Cons:

• No image upload function
• No place to enter tags

Also on my wishlist would be a way to post-date posts, but that’s not a deciding factor for me.

Overall, Deepest Sender is a very nice tool, but I’m not sure it’ll work for me at this point since I almost always use my own images (uploaded via the WordPress image uploader) in my blog posts, and I always use the Tags fields that WordPress and Blogger provide.

I’ll keep the plugin installed, though, and check it out each time there’s an upgrade, since I’m sure it’ll be changing for the better with each new version.

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