Been talking about Semagic and recent versions of WordPress.com. Hadn’t used Semagic in quite a while and been recently more active on the Mac side of things. But it does seem to work. Typically, most blogging tools do work with WordPress.com blogs but I’ve had issues with those (like Flock) which fetch categories all the time because I use way too many categories on my main blog (I was using them like tags).
Can’t really remember what was missing from Semagic for me. But it does seem fine. And it’s an old version (1.5.8.7U). It might have had to do with the fact that it doesn’t seem to do “spell as you type” (which I pretty much require). But I see now that it does support “autocorrect” as long as the dictionaries are activated. So, maybe it was something else.
After first trying with 1.5.8.7U, I’m now posting using 1.7.0.9U. While the changelog seems to contain a number of things between the two versions, I’m not sure I notice anything very striking, yet.
What I do like about those standalone editors is that they allow for relatively easy management of archived entries. Windows Live Writer is actually pretty good at this. I think blogging tools could become even better at handling blog entries like database entries (given the fact that it’s exactly what they are).
One thing I notice with Semagic (not sure other standalone editors do the same thing) is that what’s put in the “category” field is added as both categories (“filed under”) and tags (“tagged as”). The way WordPress.com handles categories and tags is a bit different from the way other blogging platform work (a bit like Gmail “labels” aren’t exactly like folders), so that’s not very surprising.
One thing which does seem awkward is the way Semagic handles the editing of older entries. When I tried updating this entry, the previous version disappeared from my blog and the new version wasn’t posted. Maybe it was a user error, on my part. I went to the “Journal/History” menu item, chose this entry, pressed the “Edit” button, clicked on the “>” to get “edit in main window,” saved the draft I had, updated the post, pressed the “Post entry” button, chose “Resplace existing entry (edit)” or something similar and I ended up with the entry deleted from the actual blog. What’s more, the draft handling is a bit confusing as it seems to automatically reuse the last draft instead of listing recent drafts.
At any rate, Semagic does work with WordPress.com blogs.
My Server settings are the same as those shown in the middle portion of this Semagic help page (using the MetaWeblog API). More specifically, the server is my full blog URL (“enkerli.wordpress.com”) and the path is “/xmlrpc.php” (as confirmed by WordPress.com doc).
Hope this helps someone.
BTW, your link from facebook to here does not work when i clicked the ‘comments’ button over there. it created a mangled URL which I was able to reconstruct to get here.
For me the perfect blogging tool is facebook. the only thing missing from their standards ‘notes’ is tags in the normal blog sense of tags not the facebook ‘tagging’ sense.
Zymurgist: Thanks for the comment. Actually, because I’ve been playing around with different things, it can be any one of a number of issues. One is that (as detailed right here) I had to repost the same entry more than once. I eventually ended up with three versions of the same entry, two versions of which I deleted. Otherwise, I did get Windows Live Writer to update my theme so it created a fake entry and deleted it. If it’s not this, I’m not really sure what it can be but I’ll check it out the next time.
As for Fb for blogging, I understand what you mean and I do find advantages of posting thing directly on Fb. But I also like having my own blog(s) for many reasons. Including tags and categories but also the fact that it’s easier to look through older entries, to add links, etc.