Blog Editing Tools: Going Beyond The Browser

We here at Homotron tend to Blog. Well, what I mean is, we all blog alot. Not just here, but other places. We love Homotron, but we all have our own things to say outside of the tech world. The problem that I personally have been running into lately though is the completely disparate nature of one blogging interface to the next. And, since I know how savvy, smart, and obviously good-looking out readers our, I know many of you are bloggers of varying degrees. So I'll pose the question: What blog editing tool do you use to work with your blog(s)?

I started off using Flock's integrated blog editor, which is a great tool. Combined with Flock's clipboard, where you can quickly slide links, images and videos for later use with your blog, Flock's blog tool is a quick, easy and very useful tool to do the quick and dirty editing and writing most of us need for our blogs. When you mouse over a video or picture, a quick link to post it to your blog appears, which is also very handy, as is the Preview Mode that is just a tab away (no need to wait for a preview to load, just click back to rich editing or HTML mode on the fly). There are a few limitations to the blog editor in Flock though. For starters, you can't resize images and video clips, and moving those same media files around in the blog can be difficult. Tagging posts becomes fun, as there is no reminder/predictive text about tags you've used before. And there is no real access to previous posts, so linking to older posts requires copying and pasting your links manually (I know, big wah, but when you start getting a good many posts under your belt, this becomes an issue).

Then I tried the integrated blogging tool in Microsoft Word 2007... and I stopped trying after about an hour of trying to figure out how to convince it to upload my photos to Picasa.

Now I've moved on to Window Live Writer, which I'm really liking, for now at least. It seems odd to me that the functions of Windows Live Writer that make it easy to use were not incorporated into Word, but then again, Microsoft finds new ways to baffle me everyday. WLW does just about everything that I wish the Flock Blog Editor did: makes media uploading quick, easy and customizable. Drag-and-drop placement and resizing of images and videos is great. And when combined with OneNote 2007, I can grab things I see online with the quickness and post them up with ease. It even sets up the writer to mimic your blog, so you can see as you're typing a live preview, which is fantastic. Downsides? Straight up HTML editing within WLW is less than quick-and-easy, and it would be great if I could integrate it with my browsing experience a bit more. I do like that it's a desktop client, but a bit more polish would be perfect.

But here's the canundrum. With soooo many blogging services out there, it seems near impossible to find a jack-of-all-trades editor. In particular, I can't seem to find an editor that will integrate with Homotron and my personal blog. On top of that, I would really like to see a lightweight, if not outright portable editor so that blogging at work would be easier (while not an encouraged activity, it's sometimes necessary). So, my dear sweet Homotrons, what tools do you use? What do you like and/or hate about them?