Month: December 2006
Recent Photos
Just had the chance to get some new photos up on my Flickr account.
Here’s a view of the flooding we had in Llansantffraid earlier this month:
This is St. Bridget’s church in the village (Llansantffraid means ‘Church of St. Bridget’), where Jnr Briggs performed spectacularly as Joseph in the crib service on Christmas Eve:
And finally, here’s a shot of the lower part of the immense Pistyll Rhaeadr:
The Blog Train
I am no longer interested in being a “professional blogger”, whatever that means. I like blogs, blogging and bloggers, but I think we’re in “post-revolution” times now. The train has already left the station. If you managed to get a seat on it, great. If not, it’s not that big a deal, either. There are plenty of other good ways of expressing yourself. Succeeding at that is far more important than what precise method you use.
Technorati Tags: hugh mcleod, blogging
PfF/ScribeFire Review
I’ve been using Peformancing for FireFox, shortly to be rebranded as ScribeFire, for my last few posts on hyprtext, and my initial impressions are pretty good. It certainly fills the gap left when my switch to Ubuntu meant I could no longer use my beloved BlogJet.
It works, as I am sure most people know, as an extension to FireFox, that allows you to create blog posts by either clicking the little icon at the bottom right of the browser window, or by using the right-click context menu’s ‘Blog This’ option, which will insert a link to the current site into the editor, along with any text you have selected. Nice.
The Good
- Setting up blog accounts is very easy, and most settings are automatically detected
- FTP settings are easy to complete, making the posting of images very simple
- All the little extras are there when making your post: technorati tagging, automatically adding a post to your del.icio.us bookmarks, trackbacks, etc
- All the standard formatting is there, and it works very well, unlike quite a few rich text editors I could mention…
- You can save draft posts as ‘notes’ and finish them off later
The Bad
- Deleting notes doesn’t seem to require a clarification. I lost the first draft of this post that way.
- I can’t edit the way some automatic content appears. For example, in my Technorati tags, I’d like the “Technorati Tags: ” bit to appear in bold.
- The way line breaks are handled is a bit different to others – and the HTML view doesn’t insert <p> tags so it’s a bit tricky to know exactly what’s happening there
The Ugly
- I can’t add alternate text to images, or text links. This is very bad for accessibility.
In conclusion, I like PfF/ScribeFire and I’ll be using it as my blog editor from now on. Most of my ‘Bads’ were pretty pernickety, but those alternate text issues need sorting out quickly.
Technorati Tags: performancing for firefox, scribefire, review, blog editor
Blogsmith Coming Soon?
It looks like there will soon be a new contender in the hosted blog platform sphere. Blogsmith, the engine which was designed to run Weblogs Inc, Jason Calacanis‘ early blog network which was subsequently bought up by AOL.
WordPress seems to be the market leading platform at the moment, certainly among hardcore bloggers. It will be interesting to see whether Blogsmith’s imminent arrival will affect that service at all – especially in terms of the release of the awaited 2.1 release.
Blogsmith.com currently forwards to Brian Alvey’s blog. I’ll keep an eye on it, as it’s likely to change soon.
Technorati Tags: blogsmith, weblogs inc, calacanis, wordpress