Communicating in a networked world
To help conceptualize where the “rubber meets the road” when it comes to creating your blog – and help you sort out the blogging tools that I’ve been discussing in the last few posts, I put together some diagrams.
These diagrams and their explanations may help you understand the three methods I’ve been discussing for posting to your blog…
I am known among my friends for reserving my weekends for biking and things other than “work.” My regular job during the week contains a large proportion of volunteer [read free] work, and most people do their volunteer work on the weekend, so sometimes it’s hard for folks to understand my pattern.
I usually put the bike on the car and go to a favorite trailhead – because riding from the house down 800 feet of elevation is fine, but at the end of a day of biking it can be a real drag climbing the 800 feet back up Twin Peaks to the neighborhood…) Imagine my surprise after loading the bike on the roof of the car and starting down the block when I reach the corner and find several dozen gawkers looking out at the bay. Usually this kind of behavior is related to Fleet Week when the Blue Angels thunder around in our skies. It’s not fleet week.
I continue across town toward the bay, where I frequently start my bike trips, and traffic gets heavier and heavier as I go. Not great. So I park the car, unload the bike and continue on two wheels rather than four.
As I approach San Francisco Bay the shore is crowded with thousands of people. This is unusual…
I don’t want to short-change one of the inventors of blogging (or at least of RSS), and a software industry veteran, Dave Winer, and his Radio Userland.
This application, Radio, was one of, if not the first, pieces of software that allowed the creation of a weblog right from your computer. A later program that I’ve used that does the same thing is Apple’s iWeb. Each of these programs lets you create pages and then uploads them to a web server – there’s no additional software required on the web server, unlike the three offline blogging tools I’ve covered recently, Flock, ecto and MarsEdit.
But Radio and iWeb stand the model “on its head” compared to the way WordPress and Blogger work. Who would use them? [read more…]
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I’ve got a challenge coming up in March. Looks like I may end up traveling again, and this time I’m going to be fully-prepared for offline creation of blog entries. In preparation, I’m doing some serious researching of offline-blogging tools.
You know that I’ve used Flock to create a few entries, and just the other day I downloaded a trial version of ecto (USD $17.95 shareware) and have spent a few hours testing it.
I just ran across the tool I’m using at this moment, called MarsEdit. So let me make a few quick comparisons while creating this blog entry in MarsEdit.
[Read more…]
I’ve continued my experimental use of a couple of tools for offline blogging. My friends think I’m online all the time, I’m sure, but I find that there are long periods – sometimes as long as a couple of weeks – when Internet connectivity is quite difficult to obtain. And during those times, it seems, I am most prone to be writing up experiences or discoveries and making blog entries. So it becomes crucial that I be able to compose a blog entry, including photos or graphics, while I’m offline.
I already introduced you to Flock, which I’d call a “browser on steroids” since its core raison d’être is to browse the web, but Flock contains additional tools that include a blog-entry-creator that’s not too shabby. The Flock team calls it “The Social Web Browser” and they describe it this way… “Flock
is an amazing new web browser that makes it easier to share media and connect to other people online. Share photos, automatically stay up-to-date with new content from your favorite sites, and search the Web with the most advanced Search Toolbar available today.”
Now I’ve picked up an evaluation copy of ecto and have used it to create a few posts. And I like both the process and the tool.