I have made the switch to Zoundry Raven (or Raven) as my offline blog editor of choice. In fact, I have been composing and posting my blogs with Raven since 21st September 2013.
I was using Scribefire Classic (a version that is no longer supported) on Firefox version 3 previously. I have been happily using it for about 14 months until I had problems inserting "Amazon Affiliate iframe" ads. There were other minor limitations that I have encountered previously in Scribefire Classic but I have always been able to figure out a way round them. Unfortunately there is none that I could find with these "Amazon Affiliate iframe" ads. Upgrading to Scribefire Next/Chrome would be the most logical choice but regrettably there are just too many shortcomings with the later versions - and some are really odd ones. There have been no fixes and development to Scribefire since 2011. So Scribefire Next/Chrome is a no go for me.
Raven is not perfect either. Like Scribefire, it appears to have been abandoned and its support forum has gone offline. But luckily, Raven's code is available online as it is open-source. I have peeked at the code (I have a background in computing by the way) and found the Python code to be well designed, written and easy to follow - much better than Scribefire's. I do have to put in more effort at times as I am still new to the Python programming language. And I made my first fix about a month and a half ago.
With a copy of all my blog posts stored on my computer (which Raven will download upon adding my Blogger account to Raven), I can now edit and update all my posts and not be restricted to just the latest 25 blog postings like I was facing in Scribefire.
Raven can also upload my pictures to Picasa Web while keeping the names of my picture files intact and placed into my specified Picasa Web's "Album Name" (see picture above). All this without me granting any access rights from Picasa Web to any other website.
There are still other features in Raven that I have yet to explore. At the moment I am just using it to compose, format and post my blogs to Blogger. I cannot say I have any complains with Raven now. Things are going smoothly as far as I am concern. But in the event if I were to face any hiccups, then I will just have to dig into Ravens code and try to fix the problems myself.
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