Smashing Magazine published an entry called "10 Weblog Engines Reviewed" and for some reason Habari was left out of the mix. I'm not one to complain about us not being included in the reviews, but it did get me thinking about possible reasons for Habari not even being mentioned.
Is it because not enough high profile sites run the software? Michael Heilemann recently migrated his binarybonsai site from Wordpress to Habari. Chris J. Davis also runs it, as well as Rich Bowen. Perhaps all we need to be considered a "serious" platform is a few more high profile sites? It might also just take review on a popular site, like Smashing Magazine, to push us up there with the more well known players. I would be very happy to see an impartial third party do a real review and compare Habari with "the others" and it would be really interesting to read the final review. I'm confident that Habari will stand up to the test very nicely.
Don't be afraid of the current 0.5 version, it might be a 0.5 release but it sure acts like it's a full blown 1.0 release. Have a look at our excellent admin interface and try it out. I assure you, you will not regret it. The unobtrusive post screens, the excellent media handling and general feel of the application will amaze you (screenshots).
Habari has a warm and very welcoming community that genuinely welcomes discussions and new ideas. New adopters are very welcome and everyone has a voice that gets heard. All in all, there is no reason why Habari shouldn't be on your shortlist when considering a blog publishing system. Come on, give it a try. We won't let you down.
is an online editing and publishing tool for your own website, intended to make it very easy for end users to update and edit their own content. As a member of Habari and with my general interest in web publishing solutions this did sound very interesting, and I signed up for the Private Beta. The service itself is going live in a couple of days, but I've been fortunate enough to be able to test drive it before everyone else. A introductory video has also been posted on YouTube:
The way it works is that you logon the TypeRoom site and then type in the URL of the page you want to edit. TypeRoom Lite then downloads the pure HTML code of the page you are editing and lets you edit it. You can then edit the text, insert images etc. without actually making any changes to the original site. You can then proceed to publish your changes by using one of three different methods.
1. The first option is a FTP based solution where your edited content gets uploaded to the TypeRoom servers where it gets stored, the original page is downloaded for backup purposes and your changes published on the original site. I was unable to test this feature, as the account I was given didn't have access to use this option. My suspicion is that you will have to provide the FTP logon information to your own site as well, for TypeRoom to be able to publish it for you. I don't know about everyone else, but I generally don't trust my logon information to third parties.
2. The second option is to email your changes to an email address of your choice. The email consists of a link to the edits the user has made and the same publishing opions are presented again
3. The third option is to download the changes. This lets you download a .zip file of the edits that has been made. The zip file contains a html file you then have to transfer to your own website manually.
I'm sorry TypeRoom, but I think you have missed your mark with this one. With the influx of web content management systems, I don't think that many users are still hand editing their updates nor doing static file based web pages. If so, they should be looking at the various content management solutions that are available to them, rather than to use TypeRoom Lite as a web based editor for static files. As impressive as the TypeRoom Lite interface might be, it's not much more than a web based editor (In fact the editor it uses is WYMeditor). I also find it peculiar that the TypeRoom Blog is powered by Wordpress, a system TypeRoom light can't really be used in conjuction with due to it's dynamic database driven nature.
The people behind TypeRoom are also working on a TypeRoom Pro version, which might very well be a great product. Sadly I don't know enough about what it is supposed to do, so I can't comment on that yet.
As far as I'm concerned, TypeRoom doesn't provide much more than a glorified web based HTML editor and don't offer much in terms of ingenuity nor innovatation. In fact I am pretty disappointed with what it offers, based on the pre-beta impressions I had from reading on their site.