Looks like the w.bloggar site is back up, although not much is there at the moment. You can download it again, but currently only the IE-based version is listed (I use the version with Mozilla/Gecko as the preview engine, since I never use IE). No news on whether w.bloggar will go open source, and no contact link for the author – I’m still trying to contact him…
In the meantime, the Windows Live Writer team have also not responded to my requests to get it working with Roller’s tags / categories system. In fact they haven’t updated their blog since the day WLW was released! It looks like there still isn’t “one blogging tool to rule them all”…
Technorati: wbloggar, Windows+Live+Writer
Andy, we (members of the WLW team) mostly blog on our individual blogs and save the “Writer Zone” blog for announcements.
I don’t recall your request about Roller’s tags (sorry, we have been dealing with a LOT of customer requests over the past few weeks!) but if it’s related to our nonstandard interpretation of the MetaWeblog getCategories call, it’ll be fixed in the next release. Thanks.
Hi Andy ! Thanks a bunch for the heads up on w.bloggar ! Good to hear it is back online although with limited support, but I am sure all of the other goodies would be back soon ! Just wanted to drop by to comment on your final comments: “One blogging tool to rule them all” and mention that, to me, Qumana is the one that rules them all. For one and for some many other reasons. But then again that is just my opinion 😉
Joe, that’s cool, I think it’s great that you took the time to stop by over here! I don’t know where all your individual blogs are, but I understand your point about being busy. I posted the request in the mailing list / group, and also mentioned it in my previous blog entries here… basically it doesn’t pick up the list of categories / tags from my Roller-based blog. Sounds like you may well have that licked – let me know if you need any additional testers for that feature 😉
Luis, thanks for visiting – I think I still have my reservations about the way in which Qumana works, but I haven’t tried it in several months. If I find the time, I might give it one more chance…
Doh ! I just added a comment in your Trying to save w.bloggar post about this same topic. Noticed this blog post after submitting the comment.
Let us know how WLW does once it can successfully retrieve the categories from Roller.
Thanks, Andy, for the feedback ! Qumana is now sitting on version 2 b5 and I must say that it has been a huge improvement from the previous betas. So much so that it is now more than ever my default weblogging tool for my external weblogs hoping that the issue with the MetaWeblog API gets fixed with the IBM internal blogging engine, which I am already on the case with it. So, yes, whenever you have got a free minute give it a try and see if it will change your opinion from previous versions. I am sure you will notice the improvements 😉
I would love to investigate all the open source options such as Qumana. I’ll try it out in a couple days. Andy, I hope you each the author of w.bloggar and find out his feelings on open sourcing it. Windows Live Writer is not working well for me. After a couple days of using it, I think I’m going to look for another solution.
Oh, I forgot to mention it here, but the Wikipedia entry for w.bloggar is being considered for deletion. Anyone who feels it should be kept (as I do) can visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.bloggar.
@Andy, thanks for your comment at my blog. I’ll write up a post about my experiences with WLW in the next day or so.
I’m guessing that you would get a response from Marcello if you contacted him using the PayPal Donate button. 🙂
You would think that, but despite making a number of donations over the past year (and another one recently for precisely that reason) – nothing.
Thanks for the reference but, more than that, the comments are also really interesting. Useful articles + good comments = a great blog. I’ll bookmark this one.
I’ve just started using w.bloggar but I’m underimpressed so far. We’ll see how it fits (and perhaps improves) my workflow but I’m also testing a few plugins to achieve the same ends. If you please, check out the w.bloggar review posted on my site – I’ll update it with more opinions as I develop them!
Thanks for the visit. As I commented over on your review, I’ve currently switched my attention to Windows Live Writer instead (since the w.bloggar author is not returning my emails), and I’m very impressed with it. Give it a try!