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]