This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
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5 May 2003
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.
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.
Editing previous posts is something that is coming in the next release.
Excerpt: Zempt is yet another offline publishing tool, specially aimed at Movable Type. Too bad it doesn't support proxies yet....
Proxy support is planned for the 0.4 release.
Excerpt: In short, there are a couple of problems, but it's going to be good.
Been playing with this and I noticed one thing that annoys me. I created an account for bug tracking and it didn't go. I never received my password in e-mail. Looks pretty sweet though. I am in a conundrum between Zempt and SharpMT.. I guess future releases will determine my favorite. How bot a PocketPC port so we can have a client for our PDAs?? :)
Any idea on dates for the next releases? Especially 0.4 (Proxy Support)
The 0.3 release should be out within a week. Other than that, we don't have any set timeline. That's the curse of open-source side projects. They get done when the developers have the time. Bill Zeller now has a bunch of time on his hands, so we should have a number of releases over the next few weeks.
Excerpt: TrackBacks are comments. They are comments left on someone else’s site rather than your own, but they are comments nonetheless. Movable Type makes a distinction between entry comments and TrackBacks that seems artificial, and it made more sense to me t...
Excerpt: This entry is posted using Adam Kalsey and Bill Zeller's Zempt 0.2 on a Windows 2000 machine. I think typing your post inside a browser textarea is really not a...
I'm new at blogging and still struggling to figure out some things--like, on the Zempt sign-in screen, what is the entry that asks "Enter XML-RPC Endpoint URL"? I have no idea what to put in there.
Excerpt: I've just made two new excellent discoveries: Zempt, a Movable Type blogging tool with which I am posting this entry...
The Good: I love the ability to post the entry with the date/time stamp set to either the time you created it, the current time, or anything else you want. The Bad: PLEASE work on the editor. An add-link shortcut is a must, but what would be very nice is user defined tags with user defined shortcut keys.
Zempt has user support forums up now at http://forums.zempt.com/ so I'm closing this discussion. Please post any comments or questions there.
Excerpt: Zempt is a great Multi-Platform posting for Movable Type, even thought it is only ported to windows users. Zempt is in 0.4 and it is pretty cool. It is definitely a ravel to w.bloggar only in one department thought,...
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Mean Dean
May 5, 2003 10:05 PM
Correction -- when I logout, I cn create another account on another blog -- cool!