Ever since Microsoft came out with their Live Writer, I’ve been turned on to the blog publishing applications out there on the interweb. I’ve before Live Writer, I tried Performancing and, of course, Flock’s built in writer. And while I think Flock is my favorite 3rd party blogging system, the browser ins’t mature enough for me to use it all the time. When Live Writer came out, it was fantastic – it had all the features I wanted: WYSIWYG, and a spell checker.

But there is one major flaw in Live Writer. It is Windows only. I know, its a Microsoft product and you expect that from them but its a good product and many other people think so too – especially being a beta (and we all know how Microsoft’s production code is let alone their betas). I wanted to find a similar application for Ubuntu so I can blog with a spell checker and not always be connected to the Internet; writing off line is great when you are traveling.

So I was recently reading this article on LifeHacker and thought of trying w.Blogger as an alternative. and while it wasn’t for Linux, they kindly pointed to an app that did what they were doing but for the Gnome interface. That leads me to the application I’m using to write this Post A Day, BloGTK.

So far, this it is looking really good. Installing it was new to me because I’ve never ‘made’ a file using a make script before but it wasn’t hard; I mean, how hard it is typing sudo make install? The software supports the old Blogger API as well as MovableType and seems to be everything a person would want. It supports HTML tags, tables, images, links, categories, and includes a spell checker – something I’ve always wanted out of my WordPress web composition windows.

One of the things that brought me to Linux was it was new. Ubuntu make it easy and offered a noob like me an easy chance to learn what was always foreign before. Before, I never saw the appeal of OSS and free software but I’m beginning to see it now. Applications like BlogGTK are free, OSS, and have many more variants like it available to the community. There isn’t really anything a person can’t do with Linux and this is an example of how I haven’t really felt without after switching. And while I miss my iTunes, I really don’t feel that I’m lacking. In fact, I often feel that I can accomplish anything because of all the support people freely offer those who need it and supply software to accomplish virtually any task one would want to accomplish on a computer.