Blogging with Ulysses
A while ago I discussed alternate ways of writing blog posts without having to use the awful WordPress web interface (and the even worse replacement, Gutenberg). I mentioned a word processor called Write! which is able to publish to WordPress. But it has a major drawback – it can’t handle images. My search for the perfect blogging software continues.
In Windows, a good option used to be Windows Live Writer but it is no longer supported. If you have Microsoft Word it is worth remembering that it can publish to a blog too, but as always with Word it feels like a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. OpenWriter is an attempt to replace WLW but spends way too much time “Not responding” to be usable. BlogJet is simply clunky. There’s not really anything better than Write! for Windows users at the moment. That is not ideal if you need to use images.
Mac users appear to be in a better place. There are apps such as Blogo and Mars Edit. Mars Edit looks the business. It looks worth every cent of the $50 price tag for American users but in Britain, thanks to Apple’s insane pricing policy, it costs £50. That is no trivial purchase and blogging needs to be a serious part of your life to justify that kind of investment. You can download a trial though to see if it is the answer for you. Blogo is more affordable and looked promising but my trust was instantly dissolved by glitches that displayed the wrong text for a chosen article. If that gets sorted out it could be a contender but for now I only want a solution that just works.
But on my Mac I do have another option in the form of Ulysses. This is a quite wonderful writing app that not only can publish to eBook format but can also publish to your WordPress site. And it supports images.
What may be a deal-breaker for some is that Ulysses is subscription-based software. I hate that model but I like Ulysses so much I’ve just had to go with it. So far I have no regrets. I am using it to write and post this article and it is an elegant piece of software that is a joy to use. If you want to find out more go to https://ulysses.app/#top
