Elicit

I  am trying out a new product called Elicit to write this post. It is a blog client by Bingo Bango Software. WordPress 1.5.x does not offer me a WYSIWYG interface or spell checking and so I find it quite an annoyance to write and edit my posts solely online.

I’ve tried other similar programs such as BlogJet, RocketPost and Qumana. BlogJet inserted way to much markup into my posts, making it tough to edit them once they were in WordPress. RocketPost never actually connected to my blog. Qumana did not seem to offer a way to post something as a “draft”, which is important if you start to write, are running out the door, and then want to save it to WordPress for future publishing.

As a result, I have been using w.bloggar for some time but it does not give me a real-time WYSIWYG (you have to switch over to the “preview” tab) and also has a pretty poor dictionary for spell checking. I haven’t been thrilled by it but it is free and the best blog client I’ve found to date.

Elicit has much more to offer than other blog client software. With built in doclets that let you search Technorati, Flickr, and del.icio.us tags, you don’t have to leave the application to do your research - and that’s nice. Unfortunately, I think it fails at some of the basics.

1. It’s not intuitive to create a new post. In order to do so, you have to double click in the Schedule area.
2. In the Entry Editor, there are all sorts of buttons except the essentials - buttons to insert links, images, etc. You have to access these functions via menu options.
3. No “more” tag support. When pulling up an old post that had the “more” tag in it, Elicit did not recognize the additional text.
4. My WordPress categories were not pulled in, so I could not assign them and had to select them in WordPress itself.
5. There seems to be a snag while writing a post where some of my words would come out liket his while I wast yping (those examplesa ctully ocurred without me trying to explictily show them - I obviously edited all the other times it happened).
6. Spell checker only indicates there is a mispelling, it does not fix the error.
7. Similar to BlogJet, Elicit puts all mark-up elements into the post (p tags, ‘ ’, etc.), making it nearly impossible to read and edit once it is pushed up to WordPress.
8. The install required additional software support - Microsoft Visual J#. If I wasn’t so interested in finding a better blog client, I would have cancelled it then and there.

Elicit has some potential but I am sticking with w.bloggar for now. Hopefully, at some point, someone or some company will get this right. I’ve read that Flock offers a cool WYSIWYG editor and drag-and-drop blogging tools - maybe that will be my answer (but no invite love!). If not, I will gladly pay for the software that offers a comprehensive and bug-free solution.