As I’ve been slowly documenting, I’ve had quite a few Macintosh computers enter my digital life recently, and naturally I want to incorporate these machines into my workflow.
Sure, I’m a blogger primarily, and you can do that on damn near any machine that can manage to run the WordPress back end, but I feel a proper dedicated “work” machine (or set of machines) would be pretty awesome to have, and with the application market being what it is (or what it should be) on MacOS, well, finding a good app to use to streamline the effort of getting an article written might prove useful. I’m sure there are plenty out there, right?
Indeed, there are, and the one I chose to give a try (seeing as it was actually very useful as a free application, and would be powerful as a paid application if I did like it) was Blogo. It looked like it would integrate well with how I choose to do things, and would also work well with WordPress itself.
So, last night I decided I’d give it a go, after having downloaded the app sometime last month and just never gotten around to using it. Things looked good – after putting in my account details, I was in, and able to write and edit posts. Cool, everything looked good.
This is where I did the usual playing around to see just what I could do and how it operates. I saw that there was a feature which would let you preview an article as it would appear on site.
Cool! I decided to take an old article and test this feature. It worked, and things looked fine. Well, for the most part.
Something I noticed, and something I would have taken a photo of but I don’t want to re-create the problem, was that it wasn’t just a preview of the article – what Blogo does is actually create a “blank” version of the article, and then plug in the data of the article you’re working on into this “blank” and render it for you!
This is a completely temporary process and really, I’d imagine, wouldn’t be so bad on its own, except for one major problem – This process triggered Jetpack to share the fact these articles had been made!
From my email inbox, the emails sent out with the “content” of the posts. This was the same as the posts shared via social media, which linked to nothing.
Strangely the articles themselves never actually got created – or, if they did, Blogo deleted them instantly. Probably the latter, honestly, is the case. Update: it turns out that’s exacxtly what Blogo did – it deleted those posts immediately after making them!!!! They are dated January 1st, 2010, and I’m going to presume thanks to that didn’t get shared with the Triberr blog sharing service I use, but they did, regardless, get shared with Google Plus, Facebook, and my 2 Twitter accounts, as well as emails being sent out to anyone subscribed to the site via email.
Can’t do a damn thing about the email’s but I can, and did, go back and clean up the links shared to social media. That took a little longer than it should have, especially considering the Mac I was using at the time wasn’t logged in to those social media accounts at all. It did get done, though, but this shows a serious flaw with the Blogo app in and of itself – when previewing content it can, and will, create temporary posts which will be picked up by Jetpack sharing and will be shared across whatever connected social media you have active at the time of the preview being made.
This is a non-starter for me. I already have enough issues with Triberr treating URL changes to my articles as new articles, I don’t need to be flooding my readers with “null” articles every time I want to preview something.
The app itself was good, but the preview function just ruins things when combined with Jetpack.
I’ll just stick to the WordPress app available for Mac, and if I want to write and am offline for whatever reason, using Notepad, Wordpad, TextEdit, or any other program that I can type into to get at least the text done.
Blogo looks promising, but with this kind of side effect, I just can’t use it. I’ll be providing feedback to the developers soon enough. Don’t take this the wrong way, I like what I saw, but there’s just no way I can use Blogo if this is what happened when I just tested a preview feature. You have to admit, this isn’t something trivial…