Blogging Robots

Who wants Gmail?

June 30, 2004 by Dmitry

I've got a couple of Gmail invites available. Anyone who wants a Gmail account can email me at gmail (at) blogjet (dot) com.

Update: no more invites left.

Tip: Quick account switching

June 17, 2004 by Dmitry

BlogJet 1.1 has a new feature: you can type a special command-line parameter plus account's name and BlogJet will open this account automatically.

The parameter is:

-acc "Account name"

For example, if you have an account that is called Mike's Blog, then you can create a shortcut on your Desktop with this command:

"C:\Program Files\BlogJet\BlogJet.exe" -acc "Mike's Blog"

and call it something like Post to Mike's blog. Then you can just double-click the icon and it will launch BlogJet with Mike's Blog account opened. This is very useful when you have a lot of accounts and don't want to use the login window.

Bad Practices of Shareware Developers

June 16, 2004 by Dmitry

I usually download and try out every competition application I can find. I do it to learn about something new, something great, something worth implementing in BlogJet. (Hey, Henry Ford did it too - he bought every car from competitors, drove, and even disassemled it!). I do it to make sure that BlogJet is the best blog client ever available.

During one of such Ford's testing I found an unfair and horrible practice that one of our competitors use. I'm going to describe it, but won't call the name of program.

I had my trial period expired, but the program didn't tell me about it. I typed an entry and then posted it. But the program refused to post and told me that I were using an unregistered copy, and that application would terminate. I clicked OK and it asked me to enter my registration data or purchase the program. The only other button available was Quit. When I quit, I lost my post. Hey, in order to not to lose my post, I have to register this program!

That's a bad practice. I decided to write about it not because it was the program of our competitor, but because I found such thing horrible and consider it as some kind of extortion. Okay, it can be an imperfect process of the registration, a bug or something else. But I don't care - I'm just a user of the trial version and I do not want to make a choice between losing data or purchasing the program right now. If trial period expires, I must be told about it!

This is my own opinion, and maybe they already fixed it, but I won't buy from developers that uses such methods to get me purchase their software.

This reminds me about some program (don't remember its name) that encrypts files on your hard drives and asks for purchase to get them decrypted.

My application BlogJet, as well as almost every other shareware program, has a 30-day trial period, and it reminds you about each day of this period. When the evaluation is over, it doesn't allow you to continue using it. But you won't lose your data. If you don't want to buy, but saved drafts of your posts, you can open your drafts with any text editor and copy text to your blog's web interface.

Spell Checker Dictionaries

June 16, 2004 by Dmitry

French and German dictionaries for BlogJet's spell checker are available now: http://blogjet.com/download/spell/

The installation is very simple: just download a file, run it and click Install. The language of spell checker then can be changed in Tools | Preferences… | Spelling tab.

Please tell me if something goes wrong with new dictionaries.

Blog Software

June 10, 2004 by Dmitry

I decided to compile a list of blog software.

Server-Side Blog Software

Software for Unix hosting

Software for Windows hosting

Recommended
Finally, you can use BlogJet (client-side blog software) to post to blogs created with the software listed above.

Here's a screenshot of BlogJet's main window:

BlogJet - client blog software for Windows

Download a free 30-day trial copy of BlogJet here: http://blogjet.com/download/

Note that this list does not cover hosted blogging software like Blogger, Blogware, etc. - you can find them on BlogJet's home page.

BlogJet 1.1 Released!

June 7, 2004 by Dmitry

BlogJetWe are proud to announce the release of BlogJet 1.1!
It has a lot of new features, including:

  • Spell checker
  • Current music detection (iTunes, WMP, Winamp)
  • Smilies
  • Support for WordPress and Squarespace

This version fixes more than 15 bugs of 1.0, including long-standing “Runtime Error 216” and wrong time in TypePad's blogs.

Read full release notes
Download BlogJet 1.1.0.20 

BlogJet 1.1 is FREE upgrade for registered users of 1.0. If you're not registered user, purchase BlogJet for only $19.95 - click here

FeedDemon 1.10 & BlogJet

June 7, 2004 by Dmitry

FeedDemon 1.10 released.

Major new features:

  • Support for Atom feeds
  • A new integrated web search
  • The ability to search previously downloaded feed items
  • Improved browser features such as popup blocking and form auto-completion
  • Enhanced grouping and styling of feed items
  • And… support for BlogJet as Blog this tool!

BlogJet & Mozilla

June 4, 2004 by Dmitry

We need your help. We're seeking someone who can write an extension for Mozilla similar to “BlogJet This!” button for Internet Explorer (it can be right-click menu item, not button). I don't think it's very hard, all you need is:

  • copy selected text to clipboard
  • launch BlogJet.exe with parameters: -blogthis “URL” “Title”

If you can, please contact me: dmitry at blogjet dot com. Free copy of BlogJet is guaranteed!