So, this isn’t one of those theoretical ‘easy enough for your mother to use’ questions.
My Mother wants to have a blog. She wants to post pictures of her quilts and stuff like that. (Yes, she is a quilter!)
So, I have looked at setting up Wordpress, or another instance of Typo for her, and that is the easy part.
What I really want is a WYSIWYG desktop editor for her. So she can insert pictures, and do all the stuff like she is used to in Windows Applications, press publish, and a whole bunch of magic happens.
I personally use Ecto on my mac, and love it. If she had a Mac, I would buy Ecto for her too. Damn, if she only had a Mac, it could integrate with iPhoto and iWeb and it would be so much easier. Maybe I will just drop-ship her a Intel mac mini, when they come out with one.
Does anyone have any recommendations on either a hosted service, or a windows desktop application that makes it damn simple to make blog posts with images?
Since she’s on Windows (a pity in this case, as you point out
), the best choice regarding desktop app blogging is probably BlogJet. I don’t think it supports image uploads; at least I didn’t figure it out the last time I tried, but other than that, it’s fairly good, and fully WYSIWYG. (Naturally, as a result of that, the markup can never be quite true to XHTML’s nature.)
However, since you suggest Ecto: you do realize Ecto exists on Windows, too, right?
Finally, there’s various clients specific to, say, LiveJournal. Back when I was using LiveJournal, I used Xjournal (Mac-only client) to post. Very easy, very straightforward and with some fun features (such as pulling the currently playing song off iTunes and putting its artist/album/title into the post).
Sounds silly I know but what about flickr?
Don’t they have like a photo blog feature?
Unless your like anti-flickr then you can ignore this comment
I know about Ecto for Windows, but it doesn’t look like it has nearly as many features as Ecto for OSX, and it doesn’t look maintained.
On Flickr… I hadn’t considered that. It might the be easiest way to get started.
You do realise that wordpress 2.0 has an inline image adding thingy, as well as a WYSIWYG editor? The web interface is very, very usable. It’s worth investigating before you dismiss it.
I agree, WordPress 2.0 is probably your best bet - the editor is awful but for the basics it is easy to work out and quite usable. Unfortunately the well polished WYSIWYG editors also come with quite a hefty fee but the free/opensource ones are competant for basic work and fairly simple to integrate into any blog software you wanted to.
what? as in fashion {ecto}>
not that i know of paul.