Using a good blog editor makes life a lot easier when you blog, in particular as you blog several blogs at the same time (say 5-6 blogs or so) on various different platforms.

Editor choices are plenty….there are no "best editors" although a poll by Lifehacker suggests that Performancing (also known as Scribefire) is the most popular one so far followed closely by WBloggar. What makes these editors so cool in some cases is the ability to add plugins inside your post without dealing with all this HTML messiness, this is particularly true for Wordpress. Some of them support picture editing, cropping and importing as well, spell checks and so on and so forth. Best of all, almost all of them will do the pinging for you when you post, so saves you time to go visit pingomatic or similar.

Here are some download links for good Blog Editors

Windows Live Writer, if you like editing Microsoft Word style, this one is for you. It has interesting plug-ins but I haven’t had the time to check it out. It’s also nice because it lets you custom edit tags….

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Qumana, simple fast and easy. For major editing needs it may not be suitable, but it’s pretty decent nevertheless.

http://www.qumana.com

Scribefire, this one used to be called performancing and is a firefox plugin, very popular but in comparision relatively simple.

http://www.scribefire.com/

Zoundry, don’t know it, looks decent enough.

http://www.zoundry.com/

Ecto is shareware, and developed in Japan.

http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/

WBloggar

http://wbloggar.com/

Blogdesk

http://www.blogdesk.org/

Open Source Semagic

http://semagic.sourceforge.net/

and BlogJecosts money is available at http://www.codingrobots.com/blogjet/ and Rocket Post also costs 12 dollars available at http://www.anconia.com/rocketpost/ and although FLOCK offers blog editing as well, it’s really basic, so I don’t recommend it.

Just because it costs money, doesn’t make it the best however…so if you have time I suggest you start trying these tools for yourself. I currently use Qumana although it’s somewhat basic, but they all do the job. I’m going to update my findings here as time goes on…but feel free to let me know what you think! Oh yeah, all of the above should work fine with Sanriotown!

Tags: blogs, editing, blog tools

Sanriotown recently launched a bunch of new blog templates. They look nice but I would suggest that they should also make some templates that have a left to right vs. a right to left type of view, it’s not a bad start but we want more!

I’m surprised there’s no super pink template out there yet!

Once you make a blog posting you may find that even though you have excellent content, nobody can find it! With millions of blogs out there, that’s hardly a surprise.

Here are a few tips and suggestions on promoting your blog…
1. Join technorati and claim your blog. Also, be sure to add an avatar to your blog, that way you will stand out. People use Technorati to search for blog content.
2. Join Feedburner, this not only gives you interesting tracking stats for your blog but also auto alerts other blog search services everytime you make an update.

3. Use your actual URL in Sanriotown when you join, eg. my blog URL is blog.hellokitty.com/ypsilonsiu but Feedburner and Technorati won’t recognize these, it recognizes only the actual URL it’s redirected to, in my case that’s http://blog.sanriotown.com/ypsilonsiu:hellokitty.com/

4. Once you’ve posted your blog, have it pinged using a service like http://www.pingoat.com/ or http://pingomatic.com/ or http://pinger.blogflux.com/. Just enter your blog URL and sometimes a brief description and it will ping/notify that your blog has been updated to a variety of blog search indexes.

5. Update regularly and cross link regularly with the blogroll option. Get people to link to you and reverse.

6. Finally, the most obvious (but often forgotten one) TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY ABOUT IT!

There are some more detailed sources that discuss how to make a better or more prominent blog here and here.

Good luck, let your voice be heard!