wish list | Blog about business and product management

One more thing to add to my Blog Editor Wishlist is To-Do list. Or ability to have some tags for offline use only. For example, if you have a large topic, like web design, there exist a huge number of nuances that you can cover. Given that you know what you are talking about.

Let’s say you are writing about how much CSS means for design and as a side thought you realize that it would be good to elaborate on inline vs. inner vs. external styles. By the time you’re done with post or article, you may already forget about it. But in our editor you right-click on a word (CSS, in our example), select a menu “Create a To-Do Note” and fill in fields where you would specify what you want yourself to do in a future.

Pretty neat, right?

At various moments I tried to use different blogging tools. Most of the time I blog using WordPress admin interface. However, sometimes I feel like I need a special piece of software, that would help me work the words.

This post was written with the help of yet another (after Windows Live Writer, Writely and many others) blogging editor – BlogDesk. It successfully imported categories from existing blog (had troubles with encodings on my Russian blog though). It tests login and upload procedures on set up of the blog. It is, however, missing some features I’d like to see implemented. So what this boils down to is the Blogging Editors Wish List:

Starting WordPress 2.3 tags are built-in feature. I want to see my list of tags in the editor.
Unicode support.
Custom fields support (I just created a hack for my blog and it works through custom fields)
Posts Map. Now this is something coming from software projects or similar. I want to be able to form a map or a tree of posts. For example – I have a main post (About Widget One), then I have several posts that link to the main (How I Used Widget One, How I Didn’t Use Widget One, Why Did I Spend Money On Widget One and so on). Then I create couple of more posts that extent some of the previous posts. I want to see this as a tree or a map. This way I immediately realize if there is a possibility to expand some more on existing topics, maybe even discover some things long forgotten that could be resurfaced for various reasons.
Ability to download all posts into the editor. With simple posts structure of a blog (especially with self-hosted, like WordPress) it must be a breeze. Having an offline backup is a huge thing, having an offline backup in your favorite blogging editor – humongous! This feature along will attract thousands of users.
Word counter/analyzer. Something similar to WordStats plugin for WordPress. It counts words, sentences and calculates readability for your post based on Gunning-Fog, Flesch-Kincaid and Flesch indicies.
It looks nice (perhaps even skinnable), loads FAST and doesn’t clog your resources if it sits in the background.

Sometimes I feel a real urge to write something like this myself. The only problem that I have is that I want this editor to be very inexpensive.