i'd like to talk about this some more.

by "this," i mean multiblog. i mentioned in the last post that i was looking around for quite some time to find a client that would allow me to easily cross post from LJ (livejournal) to blogger. i found some things, but they all varied and ultimately were not what i wanted.

first there was a client called crosspost, which seemed really interesting and promising, but wouldn't even install on my computer. actually, it did install amongst errors, then wouldn't OPEN once "successfully" installed. this program claimed that you could cross post between almost any of the popular blogging services. it would have been great to try it out! but nothing.

second, i tried something called elicit, which received a really encouraging writeup on another site. it's a BMS or "blog management system," through which you can conveniently and easily register and update all of your blogs. it has all of these exciting features like a blog post calendar, content editor, and integration with sites like wikipedia, flickr, google, and del.icio.us. well, all that sounds great. except, the UI of the program is anything but intuitive. i was able to muddle around in it a bit, but when i'm looking for a program that will allow me to quickly and easily update my blogs, i'm looking for something like, instantly. i don't want to have to consult the help file within 5 minutes of looking at the thing. actually, i don't want to have to consult the help file at all, unless i'm trying to do something really crazy.

so, that seemed to be about it as far as programs go. there were probably a lot more, but i really didn't have the patience to sit around and search through all of the nonsense for them. i found a link to a site called peopleaggregator, which i'm not even going to link to because i didn't understand what the hell it was. supposedly you also have the capability of managing all of your blogs, photos, videos, music, and everything in this community setting. but i just wanted to be able to manage my blogs. talk about asking for too much! because you can't DO that directly through the site. you have to go to this OTHER site, called outputthis.org, register for that too, and hope that it will link back up with the original site. dude. fuck that. no, seriously. why all of this work? i just. want. to manage. my blogs.

i went to the shareware site and download.com, and nothing there really tickled my fancy. i just want something like semagic, and i want that something to post to other blogs.

and that is when i arrived at multiblog. it's not the prettiest program, but it does what it needs to do. it has the capability of posting moods and music, which is nice, because as i said before, LJ's capabilities are really what i'm interested in. i wish it could conveniently post images and links like semagic does, but i suppose i should stop comparing it to that program. you can preview your posts before posting, and there are two post buttons. one for posting, and one for posting and publishing. since blogger cannot accept titles, this is convenient to me, because i have the regular post button set to LJ, and the p&p button set to blogger, which enables me to quickly add some header tags which will "fake" a title for my blogger post before posting. not bad.

what i also like is that if i put in an LJ tag such as < lj user= blah >, it will post to LJ correctly, but not to blogger. that's great if i'm posting an LJ exclusive post. but if i go in and set up names in my address book, a simple code can be substituted which will post the lj user tag and a regular html link to whichever one will accept it. that is very nice, because back in the day when i was using the movable type to LJ crosspost plugin, typing out long LJ links to users became really old.

so what i'm saying here is that multiblog is pretty nice, but it does have some shortcomings. i've only been using it for about 24 hours, but at the sweet $5 registration price, i'll probably pay for it and hang onto it. there are some things that multiblog could add to make it absolutely perfect, but i can wait to see where it goes.