I’m beginning to like Blogo. The interface is good looking; the feature set is pretty complete. I can make use of the twitter sideboard, although lately I’ve been embedding twitter into Firefox. And it’s been sped up in the last couple of versions.
The one thing that was holding me back was how it handles images. They are a little tricky to work with, at least compared with ecto. And at least to start. There’s a little curve involved, and I’m still working out some twists.
It’s not the interface; that’s solid. Blogo uses placeholders for images, and that keeps the focus on the text while giving a sense of the relationship between the text and the image. In the end, the layout of a blog post is determined by the reading device or software, not the blog posting software. All you really need while composing is a sense of which chunk of text the image is connected to. When you need to check, Blogo uses a formatted preview using the template of your blog. Pretty smart.
My concern was how to integrate images from flickr with posts. I prefer to link to flickr images, while Blogo seems to want to upload images to the blog I’m posting to. That can be redundant although it prevents blank images and possible drains on flickr. (In fact, I may be wrong about this. I’m still checking.)
So I had to experiment and dig around in the help to see the possibilities. Here, under Advanced Posting:
If you’re on Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site, you can click the “Send to Blogo” bookmarklet from any page which has a link to a slideshow and Blogo will generate an HTML snippet to embed the slideshow and insert it into your post (you can also choose to just insert a link to the page). The bookmarklet will work the same with Blip.fm, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, and Vimeo pages.
And here, under Adding HTML Snippets:
With Blogo, it’s easy to add content from YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps, Adsense, or any other site which offers snippets of HTML or Javascript for sharing content.
To add a snippet, just copy and paste or drag the text into the editor. Blogo will recognize that you’ve pasted HTML, and will add a placeholder image to let you know where the content will be positioned. You can drag the placeholder between paragraphs and adjust its alignment the same way you can with images. You can also double-click the placeholder image to adjust the size of the embedded content.
And, here, under Preferences > Accounts > Options:
This info might even be in their screencasts, but I go to screencasts as a last resort: I can skim and read text rather than having to follow the speed of the screenscast.
It’s just another case of RTFM to see what you can do with the software. That and a couple of test posts.
Cha-ching. DrinkBrainJuice just made another $25 in a declining economy.