RocketPost2
22 Dec 2006This post tests Bloget with RocketPost2. Actually, this blog editor gave me a quite a bit of difficulty. Unlike other blog editors, sends the password as a base64 string. Not a bad idea but again, not standard either. That’s what testing is for I suppose. It has some rather unique features that are a bit of fun. You have already seen one of them, the Drop Cap style (well you would if I could get it to post). Another cool feature is something called a pull quote. Just highlight a section and click the button and you get one of those quotes in a block with larger letters. Makes for some nice effects.
It has the usual image uploading and handling features plus the ability to define margins and borders. A nice touch. Other image formatting options including tinting, film graining cropping and dithering (image at left was cropped and film grained). Just enough to spice up your images without having to go to an external program. One note about the image uploading. Like many off-line blog editors, RocketPost uses the metaWeblog.newMediaObject API. However, like the passwords, it is non-standard in that it does not pass the media type as required by the MetaWeblog RFC.
Adding tags like Bloget is a snap and it supports a dozen different services out of the box. It’s a bit pricey at $99 however.
After playing with this some more I beginning to realize just how buggy this thing is. Their metaWeblog implementation has all sorts of strange anonmilies like adding a text node to the tag. It can be worked around but it sure would be easier if they followed the RFC more closely. What can’t be worked around is it does not send a newPost. Every time I to publish a new post, it tries to send it as an metaWeblog.editPost. That’s just not going to work. Finally, while they sometimes use base64 for passwords, other times it is just passed as a string value. The lack of consistency is really annoying. I don’t get a good feeling about this product and given their complete lack of compliance I can’t see supporting it. Bummer. Some great ideas but lousy execution. I finally gave up and posted this entry with Windows Live Writer because of the problems.