Have added four more header images to keep things interesting:
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How I Blog
The discussion about offline blog editors only covers a certain amount of the different ways one can blog. For example, one could:
- Use a blog’s inbuilt editor
- Use an offline editor
- Use a browser extension
- Sending posts in via email
- Post link lists automatically from del.icio.us
- Post photos and text from Flickr
- Post news and stories from Digg
I use all of the above, except for the emailing option, which I have never got working with WordPress, though I did when I used Blogger for a short while. I can actually see the use of it, for example, it would allow to blog when mobile by sending an email with my mobile phone.
Most of the uses of these blogging methods are pretty obvious. Posting from Flickr is the easiest way to get a photo onto a blog, and it offers the chance to edit the text. From Digg is a nice way of quickly getting an item from there onto your blog. The pain with these things is the need to edit the post afterwards to add a category or tidy up some formatting.
I tend to use Performancing for Firefox for many of my posts – especially those quick thoughts on something I have read or a change I have just made to my blog. It’s a quick and easy way of getting a post written without letting the momentum slide. I use an offline editor to write longer posts, or ones that just take longer to write. Like this one – I started it last night, and have revisited it several times today before finally posting.
But the WordPress editor still comes in handy, especially when I am blogging from away from home – like in the office, as well as for tarting up and correcting previous entries.
Of course, this isn’t to mention all the other software I use to blog, like The GIMP for photo editing, Writely for taking quick notes or recording thoughts to be expanded on later, Meebo to discuss ideas with other people, and talk things through.
[tags]blogging, wordpress, flickr, digg, blogjet, performancing[/tags]
More Plug-In Fun…
I have installed a couple of extra WordPress plug-ins – one seems to work nicely, the other, well, less so.
First up is Comment Quicktags which adds little buttons above the comment form to help people out with formatting HTML in posts.
The other one is Simple Recent Comments, which you can see in the sidebar on the right. Only, those aren’t the most recent comments for this blog. Oh, no. They are the last comments left on davebriggs.net, my old blog. Useful! Hopefully the chap behind the plug-in, Raoul, will get back to me soon, as it is a nice little addition to the site.
Update: All sorted. The recent comments plug-in makes explicit reference to tables in the database, and assumes that the prefix for the tables is “wp_” which is the default for all WordPress installations. But those of us that run more than one blog from one database, like me, then t just picks up the comments from the blog that uses that prefix – which is my original blog. All I had to do was edit the plug-in file and change the table prefixes to those for this blog. Phew! I was seriously freaked out for a while!
[tags]WordPress[/tags]
Zoundry
Following all the recent discussion about offline blog editors, I thought I would give Zoundry a pop, following a recommendation that appeared in my comments from Dan Masters. It’s another free one, and I’m using version 1.0.18 to write this post.
I may as well get it out of the way now: I don’t like it. I genuinely believe that one’s initial reaction to a piece of software is the most important, and from the off I just didn’t get Zoundry. Part of the problem is the cluttered interface:
And the image handling is a bit of a nightmare too. I selected the option to use my blog’s file upload feature rather than Zoundry’s own FTP system, and to be honest, writing this now, I haven’t a clue what it is going to do. The screenshot file I inserted above was automatically reduced down to a thumbnail, but I don’t think it is linked to the original, so I am guessing I will have to sort that out manually later. Update: to be fair to Zoundry, it inserted thumbnails and added links to the full size originals. Using the WordPress filesystem is also an improvement on what BlogJet does – as it keeps all uploads in the same place. Shame the UI doesn’t make it clear just how good a feature this is!
Another user interface problem is in the link box. I select the word I want to link from, hit the (tiny) link button, type in the URL, and the link title, and hit return. Nothing happens. I sigh, and move the mouse to click on ok.
The joy of BlogJet, my #1 offline editor, is it’s simplicity. It has some pretty good features, but the interface is clear and clean and much more pleasant to use:
But Zoundry does have some nice features: being able to tag posts with a number of services, rather than just the standard Technorati, Qumana-style automatic insertion of links from the clipboard, downloading your blog’s entire history to a local backup (it would be interesting to know if this could be used to run two blogs, say one at your normal location, and a ‘backup’ blog at a hosted service, like WordPress.com, say).
But it is the interface that does it for me. Too cluttered, too ugly and the text formatting buttons are way too small. So for me, BlogJet is still my favourite, with Qumana a useful backup option.