Publishing with Qumana
Several months ago I did some online research in search of the perfect desktop blog publishing tool to speed up my growing blogging habit. I discovered a handful of useful tools along the way, each with their own pros and cons. None of them were a perfect fit for what I was looking for but they were definitely useful to anyone who blogs on regular basis. The main benefit I saw was being able to post to all of your blogs from one tool, without having to login to each individual admin area. And, prior to WordPress 2.0, the desktop tools boasted graphic WYSIWYG editors for composing and formatting entries.
One of these blog publishing tools I ran across had just been launched and was quickly gaining a loyal base of users. The software is called Qumana and is now up to a stable version 2.0 with a new 3.0 beta release. I tend to switch back and forth among the various tools I have on my laptop but I try to consistently go back and revisit each tool to check for a latest release; to see if my little pet peeves have been ironed out and the improvements integrated into the tool. This week I ran across the new 3.0 beta release of Qumana and the first looks are impressive. I’m using it, of course, to compose this entry.
The major selling point of Qumana right from the beginning, was it’s “droppad”. This little application runs in the background with a small graphic that you can move around and position someplace convenient on your desktop. During the day, you can simply drag and drop selected text, images and links to the “droppad” to save them for a future post. The “droppad” in Qumana 3.0 is still there with a new and improved Q graphic.
The new user interface has been redone and the look and feel is nice. I like the buttons and layout a lot. It has a very “web 2.0″ feel to it (that’s part truth - part sarcasm there 
The features are for the most part the same. The tool allows you to create a post in the default WYSIWYG editor and you can select which category you want to place the post in. It retrieves the active categories from your blog admin. One of the huge improvements to this new 3.0 beta version is the ability to edit the source HTML code, which was missing in the previous versions I used. I like to switch back and forth between the two views while composing entries, so that the style and formatting is exactly as I want it. This is a great addition that I’ve been waiting for.
Qumana also has a button to quickly add blog advertising code to each entry. Although they currently only support their own blog ad network called AdGenta, it’s definitely a helpful shortcut to placing ads in your blog posts. I prefer to use Google AdSense ads in my posts and I use a WordPress plugin called AdSense-Deluxe, which allows me to use a little snippet tag to include the AdSense block of code in the body of my post. Since this is a third-party plugin, I still usually end up going back into the blog web admin and manually editing the post to include the AdSense block of code. Alternatively (and I’m testing this for the first time) I can now switch to the HTML source view in Qumana and type in the snippet of code for the AdSense plugin manually.
Qumana 3.0 also retains the ability to enter Technorati tags and have them automatically included in the post. There is a button at the top which pops open a box where you can type in your relevant tags and Qumana automatically inserts them where your cursor is located in the correct format.
Image uploading is a snap. To add the Qumana logo to the top of this post, I simply clicked on the Image icon in the toolbar. A seperate window opened and I was able to browse to the image on my local computer. I was able to select any desired formatting such as ALT text, alignment, spacing etc. I could then chose whether to just insert the image or upload & insert. This a very nice feature for composing posts with images and graphics and a huge timesaver by not having to manually FTP the images to the blog server.
One of the things I just realized about the new Qumana is that there isn’t any support for the !–more– tag (brackets removed) to force a page break in the post. The break at the beginning of this post had to be manually inserted into the HTML source view. I suppose that’s a small criticism in the scheme of things.
The final step in completing this post was running the spell check. The new spell check is very nice and easy to use. It caught all of my misspellings and also proposed the correct alternative, even paying attention to the use of capitalized letters in words such as AdSense.
Overall I’m very impressed with the new Qumana 3.0 beta. I was a launch user of their first version, even posting feedback to the Qumana forums back in the beginning and I’m thrilled to see the forward progress and momentum that the Qumana team has maintained. You can download either version 2.0 or 3.0 at the Qumana website.
Tags: Qumana, blog+tools, blogs, blogging, software+reviews, Adsense, adgenta, wordpress
Powered by Qumana
On March 29th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
Thanks for the nice review!
We’ll be adding the ability to add “more” text and excerpts soon.
On March 29th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
PEZ .. we will be implementing the capability fairly soon .. we have a number of tasks to chew through in the next little while, and our lead developer has more important things to do over the next week .. he’s getting married !
And I appreciate your comments regarding our AdGenta and Google Adsense .. we intend to get much more competitive over the next while, as we hook up with more and better sources of ad inventory. We are determined to offer a legitimate alternative, such that your brain choosing keywords acts as the alternative algorithm to Google’s machine driven dictation of what ads your blog gets .. plus, when people may use Qumana Ads, then Google will perhaps *own* slightly less of YOUR content ?