Two years of struggling with the WordPress editor and I could have been using all of these cool new toys.
One thing that is troublesome is that I can not seem to figure out how to set cateogries.
Oops just figured it out. Turns out you need to set the blog you are using.
Now I am impressed.
Here’s what the UI looks like before I pick the blog
Now after I pick the blog, it truly gives me the WYSIWYG experience.
Now why didn’t the folks at ecto think about this?
After I finally got OPML to work, I started to wonder if there are better tools out there.
OPML is great but if I have to do things with images, links, formatting, things get very, very, very painful very, very, very quickly.
I know I could probably modify the source, but I am looking for a tool to use today! Not a tool that I might use in the future.
One thing that pissed me off with OPML was the inability to load pictures…
Whatdya know…
The other thing that pissed me off was the lack of a spell checker.
Whatdya know there exist better tools. So i’ll try ecto for a bit and if I am still using it I suppose I might even buy it…
I am having way, way, way too much fun right now. The OPML editor is fundamentally changing how I look at blogging.
The real pain with wordpress is the interactive experience of connecting to the text editor in my web browser.
The OPML editor has no lag between the moment you want to say something and the moment you are actually saying it.
Not sure if that’s a disadvantage.
The lag means you blog less, but your blogs are more thoughtful.
Nope.
As someone who is time constrained, the notion that I can write a note whenever I want and have it appear in my blog is compelling. I hate the time it takes to bring up my web browser and connect to some web site. Why should I have to wait to express myself?
I believe this is going to change how I think about blogging. It’s no longer about crafting a long and involved post about something. This is going to be more about saying whatever I want, whenever I want.
Yipee!
Maybe I’ll stop now…
So it turns out that 2003 does not support integration with blogs, however, 2007 does.
And if you go through the MS 2007 set of demos you’ll discover that a lot of their products support tighter integration with the web-o-sphere.
I believe that thick clients deliver an interactive experience that is fundamentally superior to the web experience. However, the web-experience provides a way to seemlessly publish information on the internet.
The only vendor who would be capable of delivering the integration of the two is Microsoft, which they appear to have done.
I really can’t wait to try Office 2007.
One thing that has been bugging me of late are the comments on my blog about the iphone.
I can’t imagine that there are so many people out there who read my blog. I have to believe there is some serivce that scans blogs and directs folks to topics they are interested.
I know that I push my blog to technorati, so maybe that’s where they get their information.
I added a link. I wonder what this will do. And I defintely wonder what I will get out of this.
okay, let’s post this
Alright adding a link somehow didn’t work.
Still doesn’t!
Hmm..
Maybe now?
yes!
It worked!
Awesome!
I am starting to love my OPML editor.
I am having way too much fun right now using OPML.
Now if only I could figure out how categories worked with this tool, I would be a very happy camper
Right click is such a powerful tool …
Maybe I have found true happiness..
It never ceases to amaze me how wonderful MS products continue to be. Office 2003 was an order of magnitude better than the previous version. 2007 is an order of magnitude better than 2003.
I am in love all over again.
And after having spent 10 minutes in the Google Doc universe, I am never going back to that primitive universe.
Do technology journalists even use the programs they tout?
I have seen the light perhaps?
Or maybe not
An old and dear friend of mine whined recently that my blog is not topical.
His rant was not just directed at my blog but at the blogosphere in general. He observed that there were a wide variety of folks who used their blogs to just make random nonsensical remarks that had no point. That their blogs were an excuse to write random crap that was of no interest, not even to the author 5 minutes after they got posted.
I thought about that.
So my first observation is that my blog’s title is Day to Day Nonesense: Kostadis Roussos’ musings on a random world. The readers is warned that the blog contents are going to be both random and nonesense. Am I off-topic then if my blog is full of nonesense and random contents?
But that’s a cop-out. The real question is: Is a blog with my topic worth having on the web? Is the world serviced by such a blog or is it just my vanity? Am I like the annoying person at the dinner party that talks and talks and talks about something no one else cares about?
The meta-question is, would it be better if I had a topical blog? What if I picked a topic and focussed on it for a long time?
I ran into two challenges.
The first is that the time investment in a blog has to be small. I have a life. I have a wife, dog and friends. A column is a significant investment of time and energy.
The second is that I am not sure what I would talk about. World Affairs? Software? Technololgy? Maybe something very narrowly focussed like storage management and data management. Or maybe a hobby? Again, I am not sure one more blog on these topics would add much more value than my current blog. Dave Hitz’s blog adds a lot of value because he is the EVP of NetApp, the other horse in the two horse race in the storage market. His opinions carry weight because of his role and because of who he is. Knowing more about how Dave thinks is a proxy to knowing more about how NetApp thinks. About the only topic I add weight to because of my role is storage management and I can’t talk about that …
But I agree with my friend. A random blog about random topics is not generally interesting to most people.
However … I have a large distributed family that reads my blog. I can use the blog as a convenient way to share information about my life to them. And they seem to like it.
So I’ll keep with my blog. And as for my friend … well he’ll probably ignore this blog entry, but he has a point, I really should create a topical blog. Focussed on a narrow topic that might be more broadly interesting than the 30 or so folks in my family who read this blog.