After a bit of research, spurred on by this OMG Ubuntu! article, I bit the bullet and installed Blogilo. Before doing so, I tried BloGTK and Gnome Blog. The former had potential, but no WYSIWYG editor, so you had to know your HTML. I don’t. The latter was incredibly basic and doesn’t even download previous entries for reference or editing. It’s more like a micro-blogging client.

So, KDElibs installed, Blogilo installed and… nothing. I ran it in a terminal, and got some horrific output. It took a bit of Googling, but eventually, I found this post, whose comments reveal that LibQT4-SQL-SQLite must be installed. Total mystery why this isn’t a dependency. Everything else required certainly was.

Blogilo

So, first impressions then? I’m typing this in Blogilo now after a simple “Add Blog” wizard downloaded my meagre previous entries. I tried to make a small edit to one of those, but discovered that although the entry came down and was editable, it didn’t know what tags were applied to the post. I duly ticked the relevant tags and hit the “submit” button. The progress started… and never stopped. But it did, it seems, upload. It put my first paragraph into a bullet list, somewhat unexpectedley, but otherwise it’s fine.

But then some more serious issues arise. I’ve just tried uploading a screenshot of Blogilo in action (after using the awesome Shutter to grab the window). While gnome apps generally let me copy/paste the image from Shutter into the relevant window, in Blogilo the “paste” option remains resolutely greyed out. Perhaps some missing KDE libs, or just a total lack of communication between gnome and KDE. I’m not sure.

Worse, when I manually add the image using the add image button, it will only add at full size. If I add it at say 640×480, I generate a KIO slave error. More missing KDE dependencies, perhaps.

Finally, perhaps I’m missing it, but there’s no “Check Spelling” button. There is, however, an option to enable spell checking as you type, which I generally dislike as it generates flashing red underlines for every word as you type until it recognises what you’re actually doing. It also highlights all the stuff in the post you don’t care about because they’re product names.

I’m not giving up on Blogilo, but I doubt I’ll use it much. Perhaps if media uploading worked, I could forgive the various other quirks, but for the moment, it remains easier to type directly into the web interface of WordPress, at least for me.