More on w.bloggar and admin permissions...

Drew Robbins notes, regarding my recent post about w.bloggar requiring admin permissions to run properly:
You can grant read/write access to all users (or just your non-admin account) to the w.bloggar installation directory. The directory is usually c:\Program Files\bloggar. This will allow the non-admin user to create accounts.
http://erablog.net/filters/10933.post

Now, Drew is correct about the fix. But this only highlights my point. Applications aren't supposed to write user data to the Program Files tree in the first place. That's what the user's folder under the Documents and Settings folder is for. If w.bloggar wrote to the user's MyDocuments folder instead (or to the Application Data or Local Settings folders under the user's root folder), there would be no need for loosening the permissions on the w.bloggar install directory or running as admin to get it to work right.

I don't mean to beat up on w.bloggar. I like it, and I appreciate the fact that the developer took the time to write it and make it available. But it's also a good example of how a very simple change in a program makes the difference between a program that requires elevated privileges, and one that doesn't. I've emailed Marcelo about this, and I hope that in a future release he makes the change. We'll see.

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