Best or better blogapi editor around

I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but I use Performancing to add posts to my blogs.
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Duplika | Web Hosting

I've been evaluating blog editors over the past week or so, with the purpose of identifying one to recommend to a client. So far I've looked at:

• Ecto, for both Windows and OSX
• BlogJet2 (Windows)
• Post2Blog (Windows)
• Windows Live Writer (Windows)
• RocketPost and RocketPostLite (Windows)

Yet to look at:

• MarsEdit (OSX)
• Qumana (which I just learned about here)

My criteria:

• Must support uploading files.
• Must support integration with taxonomy; preferably ability to add freetags.
• Must generate clean HTML and support a wide range of formatting.
• Should be able to post in draft mode (i.e., not published)
• Should be able to manipulate at least some publishing settings

Windows & OSX

Ecto, for both Windows and OSX: Horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. It mangles HTML mercilessly and with no discernible consistency; it seems to be continually translating it back and forth between RTF (or RTFD, on the Mac) and HTML. The user interface is opaque. The UI is slightly better and the HTML slightly less ugly on the Mac, but the HTML is also far, far more limited due to the fact that it relies on the core Text Edit widget for its RTF (really, RTFD) formatting and RTFD-to-HTML conversion. Other notable shortcomings: You can insert an image and upload it, but you can never thereafter modify it without deleting it; once you insert a file, you can never get rid of it -- e.g., if your upload fails because the file's too big, you have to copy your HTML into a new post and start over; claims to add tags to the message, but does nothing with them at all that I could see.

BlogJet2 (Windows): Not bad, but flakey in some important ways. E.g., doesn't reliably upload files or images. I could probably make uploading work consitently if I fiddle with it, but it wouldn't be easy, and I fear it would be prone to breakage -- defeating the purpose of trying to spec a bulletproof blog client for a marginally technical client. My verdict was that it was too flaky to give to a beginner.

Post2Blog (Windows): Works pretty well, mostly. Clean HTML, good feature support. But it suffers from some behavioral consistency problems, and never uploads tags that you specify for the post. I wanted to like this one, but I'm afraid it's just too flaky to give to a tyro. That said, it may well end up being what we spec.

Windows Live Writer (Windows): This was a pleasant surprise. Very sleek UI, very clean setup, can post in draft mode (i.e., to a not-published state), can download Drupal categories (but it seems to gag sometimes on Drupal 4.7 sites) and a modular architecture for plugins. Unfortunately, it needs that modular architecture, because it's lacking several important features: No native support for tagging (ignore what it says on their website, the support just isn't there unless you get a plugin to insert the tags into your post body); and no native way to upload any files other than images. Yes, there are plugins for outbound tagging to Technorati and del.icio.us (albeit separate plugins that you have to use separately). Yes, there are plugins to insert movies from particular websites. But you can't just, say, add a link to a PDF that's on your hard drive and have it go up with the post. You can do that with almost all of the others. (Except Ecto.) Since these deficiencies have been true since November, and it's now March, I'm thinking LiveWriter is not likely to get better. So I'd say it's fine for basic blogging, but don't get invested in it.

RocketPost and RocketPostLite (Windows): Don't bother with the "lite" version at all -- it's worse than useless. I found it cripplingly Blogger-centric. IMHO, it's a non-starter.

X-Platform

Performancing (a.k.a. ScribeFire): In many ways this is the best of the lot. It's what I use most of the time. In terms of ease of use and cleanness of interface, it's a clear second to LiveWriter. But the overhead is lower, it's more convenient for a Firefox user, and it actually supports tagging and categories. If you're a Firefox user, this should probably be your first stop, and if you're happy with it don't bother going farther -- if what I've seen so far is any basis for judgement, there's not much else out there, as far as I can see.

All that said, I don't like the way it does HTML -- no paragraph tags, only BR tags -- and you have to hack the blog configuration file to give the blogs any name other than the user ID that's used to post to it. I hope that whoever picks it up will fix it up a bit.

FlocK: I wanted to like Flock, but it's handicapped by the memory leaks and runaway CPU spiking that are characteristic of some Mozilla 1.x branches. The blog editor has its nice points -- very clean, very minimalist -- but it's a little flaky when posting to Drupal blogs (sometimes it hangs on trying to complete the post long after it's actually done), and it would be nice to have some more features. The HTML is a little messy at the end of documents -- it tends to generate extraneous close-para tags. In the end it was the performance hit from using a Firefox 1.5 branch that made me quit using it. On my Macs, bot Intel and PPC, it was not unusual for Flock to be using over a gigabite of virtual and over 800MB of real memory after a couple of days. CPU would often spike to 80-90% for several seconds at a time when switching between tabs. Painful. Back to Firefox and Performancing.