Blogjet Review: Being the Last on My Block
Well, I installed the trial version of BlogJet, and here I am kind of playing with it. Cronin made me. The license once I’m done playing with it costs $40.00, but I’m not sure I get it. Blogjet is a tool for authoring blog posts. Oh wait a minute — isn’t my blog software, Wordpress, a tool for authoring blog posts?
Also, I don’t like it when I can find one or two bugs in the first half hour of using a piece of software.
Blogjet folks, in case you’re Googling yourself:
- The error message returned when you enter an incorrect URL for xmlrpc.php is pretty cryptic for anyone but a developer. How about adding: “Possible cause: you entered the wrong URL [you idiot].”
- Undo should work on titles as well as the body text. What’s up with that?
In fact, that’s a good way to rate software, it occurs to me. Half-hour software is software where it takes a half hour to find your first bug. Two minute software is really poor quality. Six month software is very robust. Twenty-year software is suitable for Mars missions. The first bug in this case was in the configuration process. Ouch.
It’s nice to have a spell checker, I suppose. But I have one of those already on Visual Slickedit, and if God had wanted us to spend forty bucks to blog, He wouldn’t have given us cut and paste. Visual Slickedit is six month software, in case you’re wondering.
Real men emulate Brief.
But back to Blogjet. Ever hear of CUA, guys? The last menu item on the left should be File, so that when I do Alt-F, I get File and not Format. And while typing that, hey presto, found another bug: you can’t highlight an individual character with the mouse, at least not obviously.
That stuff should work, for forty bucks. Five-minute software should cost $9.95 at most.
But I can understand the appeal of the tool for the Web 2.0 crowd. You can easily do tricks that will ensure that the rest of the Web 2.0 hive recognizes you as one of their own worker bees and doesn’t sting you out of the nest.
The natural world offers such rich metaphorical opportunities.
You can post Youtube video easily, so it would appear. Don’t be a grouchy old don’t bee. Be a Web 2.0 do-bee. Or a 2–bee, for short.
Or in my case, with apologies to Mr. Shakespeare, not 2–bee.
If I were a 2–bee, I’d care about Youtube and Flickr. As a realty 2–bee, I’d also have to care about Trulia and Zillow and Redfin. Not only don’t I care about them, I don’t care that I don’t care. I have second order indifference.
Having run out of venom, like most bloggers I considered that a sign that it was time to hit the “Publish” button. In the course of that I was going to say, “Keep your fingers crossed”. Then I noticed that my default category wasn’t a default any more. Tools / preferences was no help. So go ahead and uncross your fingers and relax — there are plenty of bugs for everyone.
