Location: Vancouver, BC
Launched: June 13, 2005
What is it?
Qumana is a
wysiwyg blog editor. Most (ok all) blog interface software is less than wonderful to use, and even though html knowledge isn’t strictly necessary, you find yourself using code shortcuts more and more often to get things to look and act the way you want them to. Qumana is different – it works like a combination of Outlook and Word and is an absolute delight to use.
In fact, I’m using Qumana right now to write this post. 
In their own words, “QumanaLE is a free blog publishing application that offers bloggers choice and control when writing for the Web – creating posts and inserting Technorati tags into individual items. QumanaLE helps writers quickly capture, organize and edit chunks of content. Users drag-and-drop pieces of text, links, pictures or images. Then, with one click you can add Technorati tags. Edit and publish the blog post … to as many blogs as you wish … or save it as a draft to work on later. Turn your content into a draft Word document by saving it as HTML or RTF and opening the file in Word – or QumanaLE – later.”
The download is quick (file size is about 4 megs), and including blogs is relatively straightforward. You’ll need to know where an “xml-rpc” file is if you are hosting your blog yourself or using one of the less well known services. But once you’ve located that and set up your blog, posting is a snap.
There are other wysiwyg blog front ends out there. I’ve personally used
blogjet and
ecto and found them useful but not useful enough to forego the standard wordpress interface we use. Neither are free (although they have free trials) - Blogjet is $40 and ecto is $18, and both lack features included with Qumana.
The biggest problem with all of these front-end options is that you cannot create categories/tags while posting – you must do that with your normal blog interface. This due to the shortcomings of xml-rpc, not the front-end software, so even Qumana can’t overcome this. However, they do have a very, very nice feater to automatically add
Technorati tags to the post, which solves a big part of this problem. And you can always log into the blog interface after the post and create/add categories at that time.
Features:
- easy setup of blog(s)
- make a post to multiple blogs (which is important for authors who manage lots of blogs, like us)
- best-of-class user interface, period
- easy insertion of technorati tags
- easy insertion of images and other files
- easy re-size of images and border additions
- built in spell-checker
- works with all major and most other blogging platforms
- Free!
I spoke with
Tris Hussey, Qumana’s Chief Blogging Officer & Product Manager, from his island home this morning. There are a few features that are not quite ready yet but will be soon:
- support for wordpress categories (cannot pull them in this version)
- support for trackbacks (Tris tells me
Blogware trackbacks to linked posts automatically, but other services don’t – so you must do that manually at this point)
- additional cool stuff I couldn’t get him to disclose.
Corporate Information:
Qumana is made up of Qumana Software Inc. (parent company) and Qumana Services. Qumana Software is based in Vancouver, BC. Qumana’s mission is to make blogging easier and more profitable for bloggers everywhere. Qumana Software is complemented by Qumana Services, a consulting company specializing in helping companies communicate better using blogs and other social networking tools.
Management:
Fred Fabro – CEO & Business Strategist
Jon Husband – Visionary & Evangelist
Victor Aberdeen – Product & Market Strategist
Tris Hussey – CBO & Product Manager
Graham Colwell – Software architect
Blaine Bailey – Chief financial officer
Arieanna Foley – Senior Blog Marketing Specialist
Ianiv Schweber – Software architect
Relevant Links:
Qumana is an excellent wysiwyg online/offline tool for editing blogs. We’ve written about Qumana before and described their service, which is completely free.
Ads are keyword driven based on tags you set for the post, and flow into RSS without any problems. Each Ad is tracked by keyword and clicks. Ads can also be previewed before final posting. The publisher has the flexibility to add as many or as few ads as he or she desires.
Company: 
Yesterday Qumana 
