Demise of Lite

You may have noticed that we have discontinued our Lite version of the Blog Writer. If you already have Lite, you can continue to use it but we will no longer support or update it.

We made this decision for a couple of reasons:

1. We designed Lite to be a slimmed down version of our editor for users who didn't care about inserting product links. However, we couldn't find many features to remove so it ended being very similar to the full Blog Writer. It wasn't a big surprise that demand has been low, with Lite making up less than 20% of our total downloads.

2. As we were developing version 1.0 and looking at our feature roadmap, we couldn't think of many features that we would include in the full version and not in Lite.

We might create multiple versions again in the future, but until then, we'll offer just one version of our Blog Writer. For those of you who don't want to insert product links, it's easy enough not to use that feature. But we hope you will try it out! If you're not interested in earning money for yourself, we encourage you to create product links for one of our charities or the Zoundry donation jar.

Let us know if you have suggestions for future versions of the Blog Writer targeted to specific use cases. We always appreciate the feedback!

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New Developer Release Available

It's been quiet here over the past several months because we've been working hard on our 1.0 release of the Zoundry Blog Writer. I am happy to announce that a developer release of 1.0 is now available at our forum.

We've been listening to all the great feedback from our users and added a number of requested features, bug fixes, and a lot of work under the hood.

Here are the major new features (more information available at our forum):

• Spell Check. Yes, finally! This is our first version, with more advanced spell checking in the works. It has a simple dialog-based UI that you can run or set to operate automatically before posting.

• XHTML Editor. For our more technically advanced users, we now allow you to edit the XHTML code. Features include HTML tidy, auto completion, and validation.

• Extended Entries. Now you can split your posts in MovableType and WordPress with an introductory section with a link to the rest of the post using the <!-- more --> marker.

• Localization. We have externalized all our user interface messages, captions, and strings to support language translation and localized versions. We do not have any official translations yet but we are working with volunteers to help us with translations. If you are interested in helping, please contact us at contactATzoundryDOTcom.

I invite you to try this version and let us know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions for improvement. We hope to launch 1.0 very soon!

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