Whilst the web-based UI for Wordpress and (with plugins) Drupal is quite nice, I find I still prefer to use a desktop blogging client like the excellent Blogilo: for offline composition, WYSIWYG editing, spell-checking and (with Blogilo's nice "preview with blog style" feature) the chance to check and double-check before I hit the big "post" button. (Yes, I know the webUI does most of that, but I had a bad experience with an early Google Gears implementation.) Unfortunately, no Linux client I've tried for the last six months or so has actually worked -- I've tried Gnome Blog, Drivel, QTM ... none of them could authenticate with either this site or my personal blog at glennji.org. Very frustrating, but something I just accepted as part and parcel with open-source -- "maybe I screwed up the installation, or WP changed their API and the developers haven't caught up. It will be fixed eventually, right?".

This week I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu (11.04 -- more on that later) and thought I'd have another go at adding my blogs to Blogilo: still no dice. So I thought perhaps there were others affected by this, I mean, surely Linux users haven't just accepted that there is no good blogging editor for the otherwise excellent operating system?! And if they have, isn't that a good project for me to cut my Python teeth on? A bit of hunting -- namely pasting the error messages into Google and reading three of four pages of results -- and I finally found another person who not only had the same problem, they'd fixed it!

And so, after a long time thinking it was my Linux blog client that was broken, turns out my web-host had switched on some mod_security stuff and it wasn't allowing HTTP POST to the xmlrpc.php file. I raised a helpdesk ticket and they fixed it quick-smart! Yay!

Turns out that having used Linux for nigh on 15 years (after an introduction to Redhat 5.something by Mr Dean and AtomicMPC magazine), I have great expectations of FOSS, but also a willingness to accept "broken" which is maybe no longer relevant or helpful.