Zempt and SharpMT: Movable Type Posting Tools

I found out about a pretty cool Moveable Type desktop posting tool today named Zempt. I’ve tried out Kung-Log on my iBook and I really loved it. There hasn’t been any real comparison on the PC side because everyone is trying to support every possible blogging platform in their app. W.bloggar is probably the most popular out of all of those and my opinion they all fail. Miserably! All of the reasons listed in this review match up very well with the reasons I’ve been unable to use those tools.

We’d both used w.bloggar and Blog Buddy in the past, but neither of those products allowed us to add excerpts, extended entries, or keywords to our entries. To write a blog entry with anything more than a title and entry body, an author needs to open their browser and use the Movable Type web interface. That extra step makes w.bloggar useless for people who maintain more complex metadata on their blog entries. Every one of my posts has keywords, a hand-written excerpt, and one or more categories. I needed an offline publishing tool that allowed me to manage every aspect of my blog entries.

I shouldn’t have to open up my browser to make up for the inadequacies of the blogging tool! Zempt lets me do that (I hope! I’m posting this from within the application right now ;)). Currently the application is in heavy development with some features supposedly meant to land within the week so keep an eye out!

Totally by accident while researching some other people’s experiences with Zempt I ran across another Windows tools that parallels Zempt named SharpMT which apparently supports cool stuff like saving drafts locally, one button posting, download existing posts, MT tags, uploading images, and customizable toolbars! I’ll definately be checking out SharpMT once this post is finished ;)