Why do most desktop blog editors suck?

• First, what are they truly good for:
  • You won't lose your content due to keyboard muscle-memory which differs between windows and mac users or because of hotkey mappings which often differ between browsers like Firefox and Safari. What am I talking about?
    • I'm talking about the tears I've shed when I tried to undo my last change via (ctrl+z or cmd+z) inside blogger/blogspot's web editor and it blew away ALL of my content! Was it safari, firefox, mac or windows conflicting key mappings that caused this? I don't know ... but its an evil concoction that I don't care for.
  • Worst of all is the mapping for the backspace key. It move you back to the previous page in your browser when you are editing your blog instead of simply deleting a character ... thus causing you to lose all your work!
  • Just having the comfort of knowing that your content won't be lost because of a dumb keystroke ... is just about the only thing that these desktop blog editors are good for.
• Onwards & upwards ... lets look at all the reasons desktop blog editor SUCK ... which pretty much boils down to the fact that you still have to manually edit HTML because the simplest usecases aren't automatically handled. What are these usecases? Images and embeds!
  • Is it really that hard for the desktop-blog-editor manufacturing industry (yes that is sarcasm) to grasp the fact that folks might want their images to float to the right or left and their content/text to simply flow around them? There's not a single tool that handles this via a WYSIWYG toolbar.
  • Embeds mean different things to different people. For a developer, it means embedding code-blocks (gists for example) which will have their own space and your own content would flow around and not clash/overlap with them.
  • Seriously, the desktop blog editors out there today (year 2013) are just a big disappointment :(

Adding SWFs to your blogger posts

1) Find a location to host your swf files.
For example, you can log into Google Sites and host your content by uploading the swf files as attachments:
http://sites.google.com/site/yourUsernameGoesHere/system/app/pages/admin/attachments

2) Make sure to upload the following swf files in addition to your main swf file.

2.1) spark_4.0.0.14159.swf
2.2) textLayout_1.0.0.595.swf
2.3) rpc_4.0.0.14159.swf
2.4) sparkskins_4.0.0.14159.swf
2.5) framework_4.0.0.14159.swf
2.6) playerProductInstall.swf
2.7) osmf_flex.4.0.0.13495.swf

These are dependencies without which you will face various errors when trying to run your main swf file.

a) Error: Error #2030: End of file was encountered.
at flash.net::URLStream/readBytes()
at flash.net::URLLoader/onComplete()

b) Error #2048: Security sandbox violation: http://...-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/usernam/blah.swf?attachauth=...&attredirects=0 cannot load data from http://sites.google.com/site/username/some_missing_dependency.swf

3) Afterwards, get the link to your swf and to embed it in your blog as outlined here.

4) After embedding the SWFs in your blog, you may feel that your posts load significantly slower that they did before. You can remedy this situation and speed-up the load times if you place a div tag around your embedded tags and have the default mode set to be collapsed. This will give your readers the option of expanding the content and causing the flash player to load the swf files on demand.

Here's an example of all the code that I had to put into this post.

<style type="text/css">
  .commenthidden {display:none}
  .commentshown {display:inline}
</style>
<script type="text/Javascript">
  function togglecomments (postid)
  {
    var whichpost = document.getElementById(postid);
    if (whichpost.className=="commentshown")
    {
      whichpost.className="commenthidden";
    }
    else
    {
      whichpost.className="commentshown";
    }
  }
</script>

<a href="javascript:togglecomments('1')">Expand/Collapse Example</a>
<div class="commenthidden" id="1">

<embed src="http://sites.google.com/site/pulkitsinghal/Bounds1.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#869ca7" width="650" height="100" name="Main" align="middle" play="true" loop="false" quality="high" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer">
</embed>

</div>

To get the following to work as I described above: Expand/Collapse Example