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| Jim Sky |
I couldn’t stand it any longer. When I was in India, attending the AirJaldi summit, on one of the days when the bandwidth diminished to a trickle (due to temporary technical difficulties), I just could not stand trying to create my blog entries thru that little mousehole of connectivity! It was SO frustrating! I vowed to myself at that time that I would look into offline blogging software at the earliest possible moment.
Well, today – two months later – was that moment. I “opened the box” on Flock (“the Social Web Browser”) again. I’ve used Flock a fair amount in the past, but at one point it was for no discernable reason monopolizing 100% of the CPU on my Mac, and so I returned to Safari. But today I tested out the Flock Tools/Blog feature that allows offline creation of blog entries.
It doesn’t matter if you’re currently online or not, so you can write an entry while you’re on a plane, or offline for the night, or in the bathtub. Flock opens a little window in which you can compose your post using a limited WYSIWYG editor. The features are somewhat “spare” – boldface, italic, strikethru, cut, copy,paste, lists, indent and links. Plus a spelling-checker that I didn’t try. Actually WordPress has more features than that in its WYSIWYG editor, but you have to be online to use those, so Flock is a blessing during those offline hours.
Once you finish writing the post, and once you’re connected to the Internet again, you click a Publish button and Flock uploads it to WordPress (or any of several other supported blog platforms) for you. I have many WordPress categories and tags that I use on my blog, and a pop-up allowed me to specify the categories and tags during the upload process.
Flock also has another feature that’s kinda neat – I was able to drag graphics (JPEGs, etc.) into the WYSIWYG editor window and it uploaded them to Flickr (using my Flickr account, and of course you’ve also already set one up because I previously told you how nifty it was to create embedded Flickr slideshows) and then create a link to the graphic so it can be hosted on Flickr but used in the WordPress blog. The photo above was dropped in using this feature.
There are other programs that’ll do offline blogging, and I’ll have to look into those later on because they stand a chance of making life even easier for those like me who occasionally use slow Internet connections (I use my GPRS phone, which gives me about 4kB a second of bandwidth – much like a dial-up phone connection). Anyone who has a favorite offline blog editor can drop me a line, or can comment on this post and I’ll take a look.
technorati tags:blogging
Blogged with Flock
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