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I’ve been using the Zoundry client for a little bit now and I’m happy to report that it works quite well. Even through the version number is 1.0 it still lists as being in Beta, which is fine, it has enough features and is stable enough to be useful in everyday use.

Zoundry is the free client from www.zoundry.com and can connect to a variety of blog sites such as Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad. It features a built in editor and spell checking functions. I don’t actually use these; I still rely on Microsoft Word for all my compositions. I compose my entry with Word, copy to Notepad to remove all the extra junk formatting then paste it as an entry to Zoundry. Once there, I work on the formatting.

Zoundry makes it easy to create lists, insert graphics, create links, align text and other regular word processing functions. This is much easier than using the built in editor, at least from my working with Wordpress. You can work with multiple accounts and post to each one from within the same client.

Once in the editor you can also choose your topic categories (which are downloaded from the server) and tagwords from sources such as Technorati, del.icio.us, and Ice Rocket. Zoundry will also ping the Blog servers for you. You can’t add your own as you would in Wordpress, etc, but it does support Pingomatic, Google and several others.

You can save entries for later publication or send your article right up to the server. One thing I like about Zoundry is you don’t need FTP in order to publish articles. You use Wordpress’ built in upload functions to send posts. You can use FTP but it’s not required. This just means I don’t have to have FTP open on my server.

The only thing I’ve really had an issue with is, you need to make sure you press NEW and get a new post otherwise you are editing the previous post. Sometimes I have to pit New more than once in order to get a new blank post. This could just be a delay on my machine.

Zoundry is a free program, and you can sign up for their Affiliate Service where you post links to products from multiple vendors and earn a commission. I don’t have a slew of affiliate programs to work from so I don’t need this, but I can see how it would be useless.

Other features include:

• A warning if you forget to choose categories
• You can edit any previous post and resubmit it
• You can find links to online products through UI, such as YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Google, MSN and Yahoo
• Post to multiple blogs
• See when a blog entry was written simply by clicking on it
• Edit the code of the message directly through the editor
• Save the entry as HTML to the local machine

There are a other clients on the market, and I have tried a few of them, but they’re either too expensive for the same features or they lack basic functionality. I tried Blogjet and Zoundry together and I found I liked using Zoundry more. There is a long way to go in this market before we have a real client (auto correct, autosave drafts, auto spell check), but I really like what this offers me so far.

One thing that did throw me a little. When you first post a new entry (at least with Wordpress) it doesn’t instantly appear. The post has to be copied over and published on the server. This makes it look like the post failed, but give it a minute or so and it will appear as expected.

Overall it’s a real help and does make writing blog entries easier. If you want to be able to create blog entries without being connected or using a Web Browser, this is a darn good place to start.

Plus, it has a great price… FREE

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• Templatebrowser puts link spam in Wordpress
• How to Password Protect Part of a Post
• BikeBlog theme for Wordpress
• More Wordpress Template Spam
• Trouble with the blogs…
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