Finch PocketBlogger
Finch PocketBlogger v 1.0 is now public. A good moment to finally do a description of the functionality offered.
A blogging tool for the Pocket PC
Finch is a lightweight tool for maintaining a weblog on your Pocket PC. It supports the MetaWeblogAPI, which is used by many weblogging servers (MovableType, Userland, .Text, CommunityServer). The API is also used by a number of Content Management tools, like Mambo CMS and several Wiki implementations. Once you have set up your weblog and configured Finch to work on it, your screen will look like this:
In the tools menu, you can use the option 'Sync down' to download the most recent postings from your blog. These will be listed on your screen. You can now make changes to these postings:
When you choose to create a new posting or to edit and existing one, the editor screen pops up. This screen allows you to enter the content of your posting in a large text box. It does not support WYSIWYG editing. If you need formatting, you will have to write HTML code. The editor allows you to convert the blank lines you enter to the appropriate HTML code (being a <BR> tag). So if you just type a textual story, everything will look fine on the web. The Shortcuts menu allows you to quickly insert some pieces of often used text. It also helps you to enter the right code for making a piece of text bold. Just select the text, choose the shortcut 'Make bold' and voilá!
In a separate tab, you can select one or more categories for your posting. After you made some changes, the list of postings will now show you which postings are new, which have been changed or are marked for deletion.
Once you choose Sync Up from the Tools menu, Finch will send these changes over to the webserver. The changes you made on your PPC are now visible on your blog!
Network connectivity
Finch was designed with bad/expensive network availability in mind. It allows you to make many changes to your blog and save these changes until you are at a location where you have connectivity. Then you perform a Sync and all your work is transmitted to the network. Many people write postings while commuting and then connect their PPC through ActiveSync and only then send their postings online.
Cost
Finch is free. I created it for my own use and out of hobbyism. You can download the installer and use Finch as much as you like. If, and only if, you like Finch, I would really appreciate you sending me a thank-you postcard, though. You will find instructions in the About screen.
Open source
Finch is Open Source Software. It is published under the GPL license, which means that you can have the source, modify it as you like, but that using the code in another product will make your product also GPL software.
Download
You can download the latest installer here.
Other pages
Configuration of Finch
Frequently Asked Questions