Blogger is a great tool for beginning bloggers, and it is free. However I've recommended to these people that they consider using Wordpress. Wordpress is also free, but it is much more flexible, and it does allow you to upload images from applications like Bleezer.

If you are still using the old Blogger, then you should select "Old Blogger". If you are using the new Blogger, then you should select "Blogger".

Many thanks are due to people like Jeff Groberman and Phil Gray, who endure this kind of pain and help work through the problems to make software better for everyone else.

So grab the new version (0.9.8.1) and check it out. As always, your comments are always welcome.

Configuring it is simple. If your userid ends with "@gmail.com" then it assumes that you have converted your blogs to the new Blogger. Otherwise it assumes that you are using the old Blogger.

Lately the source of that frustration has been their switch to a new version of Blogger, with a wholesale API change as well. It also seems to have broken some of the old Blogger support as well, and I've been seeing issues for months.

As the author of Bleezer, an offline blog authoring tool, that has caused me personal grief, not to mention the problems experienced by my users. And the users of other blogging tools that also ceased to work correctly.

Now there is a Blogger API help group, and the Blogger folks are trying to be helpful, but some things just do not work as advertised from what I am experiencing.

So if you are experiencingproblems with Blogger and Bleezer, rest assured that I am working on them as quickly as I can.

Of course that work is impeded by the fact that some Blogger API functions simply do not work as documented, and it appears that nobody at Google actually cares as evidenced by the complete lack of response to issues posted in the Blogger support groups.

And this shot shows how to retrieve an existing post:

It's taken a few months to get here, but I've been using it for a couple of months myself. It provides for WYSIWYG editing. If you include an image from your local disk it will automatically be uploaded to your blog host. There is better support for categories, including multiple selection.

There are a lot of changes. There are probably a couple of outstanding issues as well, which you should feel free to report via email to bleezer@larryborsato.com. And there are more things planned.

Enjoy!

I use Bleezer for everything I post, and I've added a lot of stuff that I wanted myself. So I'm my own customer, and I'm never really happy with the product, which is why it has taken so long. There is a lot of new stuff, the most obvious of which is a completely new layout and WYSIWYG editing, courtesy of an open source editor called Kafenio, which I'm not completely happy with yet.

There is also support for categories (which is giving me a little user interface trouble right now), direct image uploading to your blog when you insert an image, direct link posting to del.icio.us, and stuff like that. I'll get a complete list together in the next couple of days.

And even with a bunch of new stuff there is still a ton of new things that I still want to add, some of which may show up partly done here and there. Sorry for the wait.

The most frustrating problem I've had with Netbeans is when it doesn't do something that it claims it does.

The next release of Bleezer has been slowed down because Netbeans claims that it will create a dist/lib directory containing the required .jar files, and then include them in the manifest file. In actual fact it does not appear to do this. If anyone knows what I am doing wrong, their help would be most appreciated.

Hey, I just wanted to paint an accurate picture. Every product has its problems, not just Microsoft products. Truth be told, they actually work pretty well most of the time.

What's really strange is that I keep flipping over to Preview only to realize that it looks exactly the same.

This version also does a couple of new things. My favorite is that when you insert an image it automatically uploads it to the server and inserts the correct link.

More to come...

BTW, while we're on the topic of APIs, here's something you might not know. When I put things like the MetaWeblog API up for review, the flamer-fans almost immediately drown out the discussion, so we're left with a spec that's not complete (but pretty good in the end). Then the very same people criticize the spec because it's not complete. Isn't that special.

The other day I spent 20 minutes trying to get MetaWeblog.newMediaObject to work, encoding the file in Base64 just like the minimalist instructions said. Just for fun I tried NOT encoding it, and it worked just fine.

These APIs, if you can find documentation at all, often don't work as advertised, and there is clearly no accepted standard. Writing a blogging tool should be a simple task, but it is made all the more difficult by the need to support the various flavors of specs and their idiosyncracies.

How much effort are we expending trying to deal with the problems we have created just because we can't agree?

• Much prettier interface, and restructured menus.
• SFTP and Proxy support (though untested)
• Support for Wordpress (online) and MetaWeblog blogging
• Improvements to tag definition and handling

There is also a laundry list of bug fixes and a bunch of other stuff that nobody noticed yet.

• Get Posts with Blogger on Windows XP is unable to retrieve posts - fixed
• Blogger returns 500 error - fixed
• Bleezer occasionally hangs while sending trackback pings - fixed
• Get Posts doesn't return posts properly in edit window - fixed
• div tags in posts causing problems - fixed
• File-New menu option now does something

Support for del.icio.us bookmarking was in up until the last build when it suddenly broke, but you can expect it to show up in the near future.

Remember, suggestions are always welcome. Enjoy Bleezer!