Zempt

The last two months I’ve been working with Bill Zeller to create Zempt, an offline publishing tool for Movable Type. We’d both used w.bloggar and Blog Buddy in the past, but neither of those products allowed us to add excerpts, extended entries, or keywords to our entries. To write a blog entry with anything more than a title and entry body, an author needs to open their browser and use the Movable Type web interface.

That extra step makes w.bloggar useless for people who maintain more complex metadata on their blog entries. Every one of my posts has keywords, a hand-written excerpt, and one or more categories. I needed an offline publishing tool that allowed me to manage every aspect of my blog entries. Kung-log looked like a good choice for the Mac, but what about Windows users?

It turned out that Bill Zeller had also noticed this void. So he and I set out to create the ultimate offline publishing tool for Movable Type, and Zempt was born.

Zempt allows you to write your blog entries in a Windows program and then publish them to the server. You can publish entries with extended entry bodies, excerpts, multiple categories, and even set comment statuses and text filters. The upcoming release will have spell checking, post editing, and more.

So what makes Zempt different from other offline editors out there? Zempt gives you access to all of Movable Type’s entry fields. Zempt is 100% open source software. It won’t cost you a dime. And Zempt will soon be available for Mac and Linux as well.

If you haven’t used an offline blog editor before, you might be asking yourself why you would use Zempt instead of MT’s built-in Web interface. Here’s a few reasons.

• Have you ever had your browser crash in the middle of writing a post, taking your words with it?
• Have you ever wanted to write a post while you were on an airplane, or disconnected from the Internet?
• Do you want to check spelling on your posts?
• Is your browser something other than IE6 for Windows and you’d like to have buttons for bold and inserting links?
• Do you want an easy way to add formatting to your posts?

Then you need Zempt.

Right now Zempt is in its early stages. We released it 6 weeks ago to the MT developer community so that we could get some early feedback on it. Now we’re releasing it to the world. Be aware that not everything works right now, and some things might feel a little rough around the edges. At this point, you can only write new posts, not edit existing ones. But that will change with the next release.

But don’t let those limitations scare you away. Zempt works. Every post on this weblog since early March was made using Zempt, so it obviously works.

Take a look at the Zempt features list to see what Zempt does now and the roadmap to see what Zempt will do later. Then download Zempt and take it for a spin.