RocketPost-powered

I’m running the fully-functional 7 day trial of RocketPost blog software with all features enabled, or so the advertising says.

  • Anconia RocketPost 2 Pro 2.5.441
  • $49 professional (unlimited blogs), $29 home (1 blog), free – basic (1 blog on Blogger or Live Spaces)
  • Requirements: Microsoft Windows® (Vista, XP, 2003, 2000, NT, Me, 98), 20 MB unused hard disk space, Internet access

I’m using Windows 7, and even though it’s not listed on the accepted Windows O/S list, because Vista is, Windows 7 should be completely compatible.

I had a long, long, long post written yesterday about RocketPost, the good (there was very little), the bad (of which there was lots), and the ugly (which was screaming ugly).

The short version of yesterday’s post? RocketPost sucks. Hugely. It has more bugs than my backyard, and considering that I’m living in a tropical country, that’s a lot.

The extended version? I hate this program so much that it pains me to have to write it again. No, really, my stomach hurts.

It deleted one version. Will I get this one written without it also being deleted? I have no idea. What I can tell you, though, is that I don’t have the patience to go through the whole thing again, so I’m going to get this done as quickly as I can.

Considerations

  • Lack of transparency. There are no user forums on RocketPost’s website. No way for users to interact with each other, give each other help, or for a user to see how long an issue has been a known issue.
  • FAQs are not visible except by doing a search. No way to browse through FAQs.

The bugs

  • RocketPost crashes frequently. Yesterday, after installing it, it crashed something like 7 times in 10 or 15 minutes, maybe more. And they weren’t random crashes – I could duplicate every single one of them, and those duplications I’m not counting.
  • Formatting sucks. Trying to assign a H1 or so on crashes the program.
  • You know how, on RocketPost’s website, it says “Full blog import. Download all your existing posts and get started in less than 5 minutes.”? They lied. I can’t get more than 100 posts no matter what I do.
  • Of those 100 posts, many are duplicated or triplicated. Many. I haven’t counted them, but I’m willing to bet that at least half of the posts downloaded are duplicates.
  • It eats posts. See my opening paragraphs.
  • To get bullets to work, I have to click on the bullets icon twice.
  • While I only set up one blog on RocketPost, RocketPost still managed to pull in all the categories from all my blogs (the settings are elsewhere on my computer, so I’m wondering if RocketPost imported them from somewhere). So the dropdown category list shows ALL the categories, not just the ones relevant to this blog.
  • Refreshing the categories from the server changes nothing.
  • Additionally, RocketPost added a category called “General” that I can’t delete.
  • Keyboard shortcuts have a tendency to not work, although they do sometimes. Odd.
  • RocketPost assigned a permalink to this post. Which I can’t change. Thing is, I have WordPress set up to assign permalinks the way I want them set up, and RocketPost is not capable of figuring that out, so it should just stay out of this.
  • Preferences that I had set yesterday have been reverted to default today. Lovely.
  • Categories that I assigned did not carry through to the published post.

Feature enhancements needed

  • Keyboard shortcuts are limited. More are needed, as are shortcuts through the right mouse click, which I depend on for things like images and hyperlinks. Instead, for images and hyperlinks, I have no choice but to use the menus. What a waste of time.

The good

  • RocketPost has a reasonably pretty and intuitive interface.
  • Yeah, sorry, that’s it.

The summary

Good looks and an intuitive interface are not enough to rescue this desktop blogging program. It has serious bugs that need attention before this application should ever be considered.

I had more points in bugs and feature enhancements, but I don’t want to torture myself any further with this program. Also please know that I did not test each and every single feature – not even close. There were too many bugs to bother seeing how it behaved with multiple blogs, for example.

Meanwhile, these are the desktop blogging platforms that remain on my list to try out:

  1. Qumana Blog Editor – ad centric
  2. Windows Live Writer
  3. w.bloggar
  4. BlogMate plugin for TextMate
  5. Thingamablog
  6. Stuffr

The ones I’ve reviewed:

  1. BlogJet 2.0.0.10, released 13 September 2007
  2. Zoundry Raven Beta 1.0.375, built on 08/05/08
  3. Anconia RocketPost 2 Pro 2.5.441
  4. BlogDesk Version 2.8, build 400 from 22 February 2009

Ones that are otherwise out for me:

  1. Bleezer – mac only
  2. Blogo – Mac only
  3. MarsEdit – Mac only
  4. Ecto – Mac only
  5. Zoundry Blog Writer – it became Zoundry Raven, reviewed above
  6. Scribefire – Firefox plugin, not desktop blogging platform
  7. AIRPress. AIRPress no longer exists. Its domain is owned by squatters.
  8. Flock – web browser with built-in blogging, not desktop blogging platform.

If you know of other desktop blogging clients for Windows, please let me know. I’ll add ’em to the list and take ’em for a test drive. 🙂

Author: LMAshton
Howdy! I'm a beginner artist, hobbyist photographer, kitchen witch, wanderer by nature, and hermit introvert. This is my blog feed. You can find my fediverse posts at https://a.farook.org/Laurie.

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