A plug for QTM

You probably know by now that (like most blogs) this blog uses WordPress. What's less obvious is the software I normally use to write entries, and that's because I write it myself and rarely mention it on here, but with the last couple of releases managed to get one out that fix some long-standing, irritating bugs that anyone using it would quickly run into, so I thought I'd mention it on the blog I write that most people read. The software is called QTM, and runs on all the major desktop platforms — Windows, the Mac and Linux, and that's because it's based on Qt, which (in theory) lets you write an app once and then run it on several different operating systems (not just the three mentioned, although they are the most common). In practice it's a bit more complicated if you want the program to look good on all those platforms, but it will work.

QTM mainly supports WordPress these days, but also supports Movable Type as that's what it was originally written for (not Blogger or LiveJournal). It lets you compose and format entries, save them and post them to your blog. It also lets you compose based on an existing story or blog post (similar to "Press This" on WordPress and "Quickpost" on Movable Type) and use templates to pre-format these posts. It supports Markdown on Mac and Linux (on Windows you will need to install Perl, since that's what Markdown is written in). It doesn't let you manage existing blog posts, as yet.

QTM's web page is here and you can find a Windows installer and a Mac disk image there; I have also set up download repositories for the Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Fedora Linux distributions. If you need help setting it up, let me know (easier set-up is probably the next thing on the list of things to do).