Chrysanth WebStory 5.0

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on December 20, 2011

Blogging hasn't become the world's second-favorite indoor activity, yet. But with so many free blogging resources available, it seems to be only a matter of time. However, time is a scarce commodity when it comes to keeping up with your blogs. Chrysanth WebStory is a free tool that can help you manage, edit, and back up your blogs and image accounts. It comes with a free online account for posting to your blogs and other sites from your PC or smartphone or other mobile device. WebStory is compatible with all major blog platforms, including Blogspot, WordPress, and LiveJournal, as well as microblogs like Twitter, Web albums like Picasa and Flickr, and other image-sharing and social-networking sites.

Part of installing and setting up WebStory involves signing up for the free account, but it's easy and takes little time. You can protect your database with a password or enable free access. The user interface resembles Office's ribbon-based layout, with a home-pagelike File tab and additional tabs labeled My Blog and My Microblog, with an additional My Album option. The setup wizard recommends taking its brief tutorial, which does a fine job of getting new users started. You don't need to have an existing blog to use WebStory; a wizard makes it easy to create a new one using the Self.my service. We could also register with any of the blogging sites WebStory supports, and easily set up a blog, microblog, or blog group from each tab's navigation pane. Once we'd added our blogs and other sites, we could select them from a drop-down list. Selected blogs show Post, Page, and Task counts. Several options are important, such as setting the Default File Upload Storage Account, external tagging and pinging services, database path, plug-ins, and other access features, as well as spell-checking, editing, and program behavior.

We found it very easy to set up a free blog using WebStory's resources or register for a variety of other blogs directly from its support page. We didn't see our preferred blog site in WebStory's list of supported sites, even though it's one of the larger free blog providers. But WebStory supports most blog sites that offer the standard remote-publishing interface, so if you don't see yours, check its documentation of FAQs.

Publisher's Description

From Chrysanth Software:

Chrysanth WebStory is a desktop blog management software that helps you manage and back up multiple blogs, Twitter, Picasa and Flickr accounts easily.Through WebStory, you may be able to remotely manage your blog posts, including publish new posts or pages, edit/ delete published posts or pages. You may even set a timer to publish your post or even Twitter messages. Twitter messages that exceed 140 character limits may also be converted into images automatically upon publishing. Supported blog servers and blog services include Facebook, BlogSpot.com, WordPress.com, TypePad.com, LiveJournal.com, WordPress blog server, MovableType, Drupal, Nucleus and many other blog servers and services.

You may be able to write your entire new post offline with WebStory, and format your content nicely without any HTML knowledge. Inserting images from your computer is also a snap. When everything is done, just one click will get your post and images published to you blog immediately.Another benefit is that, when your ideas are flowing while you are on the move, you may also post a twit to your Twitter account via your mobile devices, which may then be synchronized back to WebStory when you are back to your desktop. Vice versa, you may also post your new ideas anytime via WebStory back to your Twitter account, just to get yourself organized, or to prepare for your next blog post.Additionally, if you are maintaining a photo blog, then WebStory's web album support such as Flickr and Picasa will surely come in handy. You may publish and back up your photos to photo sharing sites or your own blogs easily.

For those who manage multiples blogs, WebStory's capability to manage and synchronize multiple blogs concurrently will help you to be more productive and enjoy blogging more than ever. With a single click, you can easily publish to multiple blogs, or perform regular backup on all the online blogs, miroblogs as well as web albums.

What's new in this version:

[New] Now pictures from TwitPic, Instagram and YFrog could be viewed directly in theÃ?Â Twitter Message Browser.
[New] Added option to disable automated comment backup.
[New] Improved Twitter message browsing experience with the new message template.
[New] Added support for scheduled publishing interval between blogs.
[New] Added a Follow button to Twitter Message Browser toolbar.
[New] Added a splitter to adjust Twitter Message Browser width... See all new features