Could BlogJet Be Any More Buggy? Great Idea, Needs Help

This November I will have been officially blogging for 1 year. Though I'd argue it has been longer as I have been writing personal opinion pieces on OfficeZealot.com for many years.

Through out that time period I have experimented with many forms of content management software in the form of commercial software, open source and our current home grown (.NET based) content management system. There are many challenges in running a successful community website and they biggest is CONTENT. To repeat an overused Internet media cliche "Content is King." I was having sushi with Doug Seven of DotNetJunkies.com last winter and he told me that the biggest driver to expanding the .NET community over all other things they have done is to provide lots of content. New Content. Frequent Content. Boiled Content. Seasoned Content. Gumbo Content . Relevant Content (you have to use your best bubba-gump voice to hear that last phrase in your head correctly).  His synopsis was that a community site can do all kinds of great things but it all boils down to unique content.

For a long time I thought content was dependent on having good software for managing the content. Yes this naive view is reflective of my software engineering background (in other words, build the ultimate content management system and the content will just come). Software engineers are guilty of often thinking software is the solution. Well as you probably know and as I eventually discovered it takes people to produce content. Yes Humans behind keyboards are the key.

After I learned this simple life lesson I began to focus on finding people to help contribute to OfficeZealot.com. Believe it or not finding people is not hard. Finding people with free time who can write content is a challenge. With that in mind I made it my goal to make content contribution to OfficeZealot.com as simple, easy and fast as possible. After many different approachs, I settled on creating a blog aggregator and aggregating Office related blogs and offering free blogging on OfficeZealot.com.

We are now at about 120 Office related blogs and growing. Every day the site get about 10 to 20 new articles via these blogs. We are currently getting about 4,000 unique visitors every day to our site and about another 4,000 subscribe to our main RSS feed on the home page.

In my efforts to build upon this success, I've been looking for better ways for people to contribute with minimal hassle. If you remove the burden and pain and make it fun for people to contribute content they will do so without much thought. If it requires more work to get the content to us then they won't even start.

Woohhhhh.... Ok. Long thread, but it leads me to my title of Could BlogJet Be Any More Buggy? Great Idea, Needs Help. About two months ago I started using a client side windows application named BlogJet and registered it about a month ago for $19.95 (don't be confused by that is basically the same thing as 20 dollars). Here is a picture of it:

Overall I like the software and its starts to deliver on my goal of hassle free blogging. Basically, BlogJet allows you to focus on authoring your blog content and easily submitting it to your blog server. It includes a WYSIWYG editor that allows the author to focus on writing and formatting their message. They can even edit the HTML if they feel so bold.

I'd say that the time I spend getting a blog entry posted has decreased by 50% since I started to use BlogJet. It basically removed the logging into my blog engine and trying to work in the clumsy interface of the browser.

All in all it sounds great! Right? Well I do think BlogJet is on to a great idea and I think competition is right behind them. The problem with BlogJet is that it seems to be plagued with bugs. Examples:

• Sometimes I start BlogJet and decide to close it and get a nice "BlogJet has crashed" message from Windows
• I use the FTP feature to post my images in BlogJet. This worked just dandy for a while and suddenly just stopped working. Sometimes the images get posted as 0 length files to my FTP server. Now, I know my FTP server is working as I have posted from CuteFTP and the FTP service on the Windows XP desktop.
• Frequently if I try to re-edit a post and when I go to repost it, it fails with a bogus error that doesn't tell me anything except that it failed and I have to log into the server and work with the post the old-fashioned way.
• Today I tried saving this post as a draft on my desktop and it wouldn't save. I hit Save As. The Save As dialog box appears and I hit save and nothing happens.
• Image alignment sucks! One of the benefits of using a WYSIWYG editor is that it should take a way all the trivia of creating the HTML. BlogJet has very limited image placement and manipulation capabilities. This might seem critical, but even FrontPage 1.0 back in 1998 had better image control.

So BlogJet: Stop focusing on fancy shiny features like "Detect Music" or "Attach Voice" and focus on the quality of the editor. Get the basics working 100%. Otherwise I think your competitors will quickly eat you up.

Now don't take me wrong. I still recommend BlogJet, but for now I'd consider it a temporary investment until they improve or someone else does a better job.

Anyone else out there had odd experiences with BlogJet or are you using something different?