Dan Conley » Blogging

If they want blag wah, we’ll give them blag wah

Dan — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:38:23 +0000

So tiny has answered my ‘two posts in a day’ challenge with three posts in a day, has he? And he claims that I won’t be able to bang out four today?

He’s probably right. Crap. Even if I do manage to squeeze out four today, that just means I’ll have to put out six on Monday (everyone knows weekends are off limits; it’s like blogging Ramadan), meaning that by the end of the week I’ll be able to blog about job hunting after my ass gets canned.

Well played, Edmunds.

Wishing you were somehow here again, ecto

Dan — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:03:49 +0000

I eventually decided that ecto wasn’t worth spending money on, but damn if I don’t miss it. I’m trying out Qumana which seems… crappy. It seems to be coded in Java, and Java apps in OS X have this… look to them that I don’t like. They also don’t particularly function well. I probably won’t use it again, but it’d really be nice to have a way to have all my entries (across all the blogs that this self-important author has gotten himself into) stored locally, be able to have drafts stored here, etc.

Sigh.

For what it’s worth…

Dan — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:08:29 +0000

I decided to ditch Ecto. A very good program, but in essence it only allowed me to

Post from one place instead of the admin interface of each blog
Link to Flickr easier

Now, those are nice options — and I also liked having a local backup of posts, and the ability to draft — but the $18 I’d have spent on it is instead going to go to BeerAlchemy.

Why am I so lazy?

Dan — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:35:36 +0000

My free trial for ecto is running out soon, so I’ve been thinking about whether or not to buy it. The advantages, as far as I can tell, are thus:

Auto-add images from Flickr
Don’t have to log into the site

So, in essence, I want something on my dock (as I’ll be doing most of my blogging from my Macbook) instead of having to navigate to danconley.net. It doesn’t seem like that’s worth paying $18 for.

Granted, it’s also nice to have a local copy of everything (especially drafts), and it’s easy to post to multiple blogs from the same place, but… $18 buys a lot of Rock Band songs.

I should hopefully be upgrading to WordPress 2.5 later this week; hopefully that has some nifty features that can soothe my pain.

ecto / A belated St Patrick’s Day

Dan — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:16:06 +0000

I bit the bullet and downloaded ecto. By the time the 21 day free trial is up I’ll either have the required $18 or be able to say ‘eh, it’s not that great.’

So far I like that you can add and remove categories from the editor (another thing Deepest Sender doesn’t do). Let’s see how it handles images by talking about Beamish, shall we?

Now, of course, I have to deal with Beast Blog’s only real downside: a really, really thin content box. I could fix it easily enough, of course, but that would take more effort than I’m liable to include

I haven’t had Guinness in a while, so I can’t compare directly, but Beamish is certainly a stout. (Damn, why don’t I just hand myself that BJCP certification now?) I think I’m more of a fan of porters, at least over Irish Stouts, because they have ‘dark’ and ‘bitter’ down but — in my horribly inexpert opinion — don’t have as much in the flavor department. Of course not all stouts are Irish, and I’ll drink it if you give it to me.

Beamish cans also have the nitrogen widget that Guinness bottles do, though Beamish advises that I pour ‘in one smooth motion’ (paraphrased) while I believe Guinness says ‘drink straight from the bottle.’ I haven’t bought it since I started using glassware, so I’m not sure if Guinness pours well.

Not being an expert on the style, there’s really not much I can say. Again, this post was mostly an excuse to use ecto’s Flickr integration. I have a problem with Guinness’ popularity, though — I consider it a brand more than a beer — and as such my counter-culture tendencies, or at least my pretensions, mean that if given the choice I’d probably go with Beamish.

Rating: 4 stars out of my ass

(see what I did there?)

Blogging software

Dan — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:50:05 +0000

There are two important things to know about me:

I am lazy
I am cheap

So, I want to be able to blog easily, but have whatever I’m using not cost anything. I’ve been using Deepest Sender, as I’ve mentioned a few times, but I think I may actually be outgrowing it. For one, now that I added a second blog (more on that when it’s ready), the fact that danconley.net auto-logs-in is annoying. You’d think that unchecking ‘log in automatically’ would do the trick, but you would be sadly mistaken.

Also, I’d like to start using more pictures in posts. Maybe not as much here, as I don’t need to illustrate my self-involved delusions, but while the browser admin panel for WordPress allows me to upload images and then insert them, DS does not. Now I understand what Lifehack.org meant when they said Firefox blogging extensions had ‘no good image support.’

While I have a PC as my ‘main’ computer, I do most of my blogging from my Macbook and so any downloadable application would need to work with OS X. But not 10.5, because point 2 up there prevents me from upgrading.

I’ve checked out ecto, as I’ve heard about it a few times, but while $18 is cheap it’s certainly not free, and that is after all what I’m striving for.

Does anyone know of any good — or at least decent — blogging programs that will let me upload images easily? Of course I’m worried that that will mean ‘FTP’ which is a no go: this server is locked down too tightly for any of that port 21 crap. I may be stuck with what I have, or spending some money; I have no problem paying for something if I’ll use it, so biting the bullet re: ecto isn’t out of the question as long as it’s very, very good.

Or I could suck it up and just use CyberDuck to upload things myself

Always the last to know

Dan — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:44:36 +0000

I’ve considered using Google Reader for my blog reading, but ditched it because (at last check) you couldn’t order entries oldest first. I figure that there may be updates and so on, so I want to read things in the order they were posted.

The only thing I didn’t like about Bloglines is that when I start reading a site, every post is marked read. This means if I don’t have time to read everything Jessamyn West has had to say over the past week I won’t read, which leads to me not reading a bunch of blogs I’m otherwise interested in.

So why has no one read my mind and told me that the Bloglines Beta (the first ‘B’ is an uppercase beta: I see what you did there) does exactly what I want? If there’s a post I have to hit j to highlight it to have it marked read, but eh. Definitely worthwhile.