Here is a recap of my first experience using RocketPost - a new full featured blog posting tool.

The Setup Wizard asks you to name the blog as you set it up. Why
doesn't it just retrieve the name when you give it the blog host
address and account info?

After asking you for the name of the blog, then it asks whether
you have a blog on the Internet. BlogHarbor is a choice but Blogware is
not. So for Blogware users who are not BlogHarbor customers, it is
confusing when it asks for a BlogHarbor user name and password which is
actually the Blogware user name and password.

It retrieved the entire list of all my Blogware blogs but then
only allowed me to choose one from the list to set up. I have a ton of Blogware blogs
that I maintain and just want to be able to set up all of them at once.

I chose my
internal company blog (the first one in the list) even though I had
entered Mohr Blog (my personal blog) at the first prompt, just to see
what would happen.

It asked me if I wanted to retrieve old posts so I told it to retrieve my last five posts. No posts were retrieved.

I tried the “Set up blogs” option from the Tools menu and
changed the name of the blog in RocketPost to match the name of the blog on Blogware. Still
not able to retrieve posts.

I set up my internal company blog. Still not able to retrieve posts for that either.

RocketPost has a far more robust editor than any other blogging client I have used.

1. It counts words as you type.
2. It allows you to attach a date and timme to your post so you can
   post to the past or the future. With BlogJet I have to post as a draft
   and then go into the Blogware interface to adjust the date before
   publishing.
3. It has a strikeout formatting button - useful for corrections
4. It allows you to insert Web Service tags such as Google or Google Images

5. blogblog

   Glen Mohr

   The
   photo editor seems great but we'll see what it looks like when it
   posts. I set the picture here with as left justified and gave it
   margins of 10. For some reason the word “blog” was added on either side
   of the picture. Then I edited the picture and set the margins to zero.
   The words “blogblog” then moved to the top of the picture. Not sure
   where they came from. But just being able to edit a photo on the fly is
   fantastic.

6. Another nice feature is the “continue reading break” except I'm not
   sure where the text goes that you type after the break. I would expect
   it to put everything above the break into the excerpt field and the
   full post into the body field.

Editor is very easy to use. I added a drop cap to this paragraph.

Here is a left pull quote that I did with one paste and click:Just being able to edit a photo on the fly is fantastic

I'm not sure how the spell check works becuase I wasn't able to get it to find any of my misspellings.

I'm going to try a file attachment as well becuase I've always had
trouble getting attachments and photos to come through to Blogware when
posting with BlogJet. glenmohr.JPG (4 Kb)
Ok

, that's a problem. When I insert a file attachment and then hit
return to go to the next line and continue typing, for some reason the
first couple characters of what I type following the file attachment
are added to the link to the file attachment - see “Ok” above.

I'm going to try the file attachment again: glenmohr.JPG (4 KB)

This time I hit two line breaks after the attachment link and that seemed to work.

Now I'll post.

As you can see, neither the photo nor the attached file came through.

Everything below the “continue reading” break did not make it onto the blog. I'm not sure where it went so I took out the break.

I just went back into the RocketPost editor, to add this.You can
easily tell if a post in the editor has been published becuase the
permalink shows up.

The feature that immediately caught my attention with RocketPost is
the abilty to post to multiple blogs at the same time. I haven't seen
this in any other blogging client and would be very useful. I tried to post this article to my internal company
blog and my personal blog at the same time but could not find any menu
choice to do that.

When I checked the RocketPost window that displays all my blogs, I
discovered that the old posts, only three instead of the five I had
requested, had been retrieved. Perhaps it just took a while. No option
there either to post to multiple blogs simultaneously.

The online help told me to add the URL for my blog to the images
settings to ensure that pictures get uploaded. When I went to do this,
I discovered it was already set correctly, so no help there.

I also can't find an option to switch blogs while I am editing a
post. I frequently start writing a post and realize I'm set to publish
to the wrong blog. With BlogJet I can just go to “manage blogs” and
change blogs without haveing to start over.

I called up an old post copied the text, started a new post for a different blog and pasted in the contents. Then I modified it and tried to post. RocketPost did not like this. It would not post and kept giving me an “internal error” message. Also it started using about 96% of my CPU's capacity until I shut it down.

So, RocketPost has a lot of nice features but is not yet working right for Blogware.

Share This

This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Weblogs and Business, PingWare, Learning 2.0 Services. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.