Qumana: Small Business Blog of the Day

Today's post originated from a question one of our other bloggers had while responding to my interview questions. Dan Harris answered my interview questions last week and asked about alternatives to using the Typepad post interface (see comments on this post):

"I like Typepad a lot, but I don't like it when I am working on a blog and my wireless connection goes down and I lose a post.  I'm looking into the best software out there for this sort of thing.  If any one has any recommendations on this, I'm all ears."

I quickly responded that I first use Dreamweaver to write my posts, but another reader, Josh Hallet of Hyku.com, suggested today's 'blog editor.' Sure enough, they have a blog for their product making them a perfect candidate for the Small Business Blog of the Day.

What it is
The Quamana Blog is the blog for the Qumana Blog editing program written by Tris Hussey, the Chief Bloggging Officer of Qumana..

Qumana takes a little explaining...if you don't like typing your blog in Typepad (or Blogger, or WordPress), you can use this program to type out your post and upload the post to your blog. The advantage is that you won't lose your post if your blogging host has a connection problem, it's a friendlier format, and you can add Technorati tags automatically as well as small Google-type ads into your posts. Very cool.

Features
The blog discusses the Qumana program as well as advertising on your blog, ways to get your blog noticed by a wider audience, and news items that relate to the blogging industry.

Favorite Post
Here's a post that discusses a David Sifry article about the state of the Blogoshpere. What I like about the post is the analysis and explanation of tagging in a blog post. If you aren't real familiar with tagging, how it works, and how important it is, this post is a good introduction into the subject.

"I don't share his opinion that tag-spam will be prevented by a self-policing system, but since it is on Technorati's radar--and many of ours as well--I expect (and hope) that potential solutions can be found before it becomes a problem."

Further Comments
When you visit the blog it asks for a username and password. Annoying. You can hit "Escape" and avoid filling in these fields and start reading the blog, so I don't even get why it asks for this info.

Other than that, pretty solid blog. I'm actually writing this post using Qumana (which is an equally difficult word to type as 'Pajama Market!), and I really like the editor. It has a very clean format and is pretty easy to pick up.

Adding some pictures to the blog would make me very happy. It's text-intense, and although the site looks very slick, the blog looses flashiness without some photos.

One further note...this is FREE. The editor costs nothing to download, there don't appear to be any annoying advertising pop-ups in the program or anything. Qumana makes their money by making it super-easy to place ads in your posts, and they take a small cut of the action. Super-slick!

Tags: qumana, tris hussey, blog editor, offline blog editor, david sifry

Comments

[Tris Hussey]

Brian, Thanks for the great write up and review. I'm glad you liked my Technorati article.

On that stupid dialog box ... Blogware (that is the hosted blog platform Qumana uses) thinks that it's a strange interaction with the Google toolbar. Tre annoying, but I know they are working on it.

[Brian Brown]

Ah, that explains it. Sounds temporary though. Can't really complain about that.

Cheers.