Journal

Five days ago I downloaded this program for Mac, Journler. It seems at first glance to possibly provide something I have been looking for in a blogging client. I spend a lot of time on the internet, a large portion of that looking at or for time-saving (free) applications. Perhaps if I didn’t spend so much time looking for or at these programs I would get more work done. I digress.

What I have wanted is a blogging interface that allows me to write offline, and easily post later at my online convenience. Some have seemed to provide me with that, but saving and then pulling up the posts again, editing them and keeping them in an easily accessible and understandable order has been lacking. Rather than a blogging interface, Journler is just that, a journal. As an extra, it allows you to blog journal entries. This means that instead of simply interacting with the blog, everything is on my hard drive. To really appreciate the promise this seems to hold, you would have to download and see what I’m talking about. Unfortunately if you don’t use a Mac, you would also have to spend a couple thousand dollars making the Apple switch as well.

The beauty is that you simply write a journal. Isn’t that what a blog is? Only if you want to lay everything out there. This is a journal where you can feel free to write poorly, then pick and choose which journal entries to post to your blog – the others remain private if you so wish, stashed away on your hard drive, yet accessible in an easily navigable way. Not only that, but you can record audio within the application, add music directly from iTunes, pictures directly from iPhoto, add video – all in a single journal entry and all within the program.

Now I sing the praises, while this is the first journal entry I have done with the full intention of sending it out as a blog post. Other paid-for blogging interfaces are Ecto and MarsEdit. They have free trial periods I will take advantage of during the World Cup to assess their useability and suitability. Until then, however, I’m going to give this a run and see how it goes. One downfall is that it says there is no support for WordPress, which is what my blog runs on. I will however, still see if I can get it to work.

I was unsuccessful. I think if I was running Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) I could get it to work, but I’m on 10.3.9 (Jaguar). The next version of the program is going to have the direct blogging option available for more blogging clients, including WordPress. Unfortunately, that too will only be compatible with Tiger. This means I still have to export content from the program somewhere else and then post it. My 30 seconds is valuable! Actually it isn’t so much. If it was I would be working on my assignment due next week.