Besides Scribefire, There Are No Good Blog Editors in Linux

I am rather writing this out of frustration more than anything. I have been trying to find a viable alternative to Windows Live Writer for Linux. I know that I mentioned Scribefire a few months ago, but ever since my buddy Sundance convinced me to make the switch to Windows Live Writer (WLW) it has been hard to go back.

There are many desktop blog editors for Linux, just none as good as WLW. I've tried Drivel and Gnome-Blog, both are basically glorified text editors. BloGTK showed some promise, but it crashes when you try to run it in Ubuntu 9.04 (Known bug). There is Qumana, which is Java based, but it hangs when trying to post. There are a few others, and not one of them has the features of WLW.

Scribefire is still pretty good. It has most of the features that WLW has, except it doesn't do on-the-fly picture editing, which is the main reason I like WLW so much. I can just grab a picture from my desktop, import it into WLW, watermark it, add a drop shadow, and tilt it all in one program. I can't do that in any other editor, especially none for Linux.

So how am I working around it? I decided I would use Scribefire in conjunction with the Picture2Life, which is a free online photo manipulation program. There is also a Firefox plugin for Picture2Life so you can grab any picture off the web easily and load it into Picture2Life's editor lickity split.

Now Firefox is my blog editor of choice in Linux. I can blog in Scribefire, and in the window above Scribefire, i can make my edits to pictures using Picture2Life, download the edited pic, and re-upload it into Scribefire without minimizing my window.

It's no WLW, but it is the best blogging solution I have found for Linux that offers the closest-to-wlw experience I can get. So far, nothing else has come close. Above is a picture I did real quick with Picture2Life. I was able to watermark it, add a drop shadow, and tilt it all like I do in wlw. There are other effects you can add too like mirror, lighting, and cropping to name a few.

What do you use for blogging in Linux? Have you gotten BloGTK to work? Maybe you are using a lesser known Linux blog editor. Who knows? Let me know what you are doing in the comments.