Oban’s Penseive

I have spent way too much tim over the last couple of days obsessing over this blog. I have read and researched and bookmarked and clipped everything I could get my hands on related to the technical and design aspects of blogging. That parts fun to learn, but it distracts from the key, which is content. There is so much information about what makes a “good” blog – one that will be compelling and draw readers – that I pretty much lost sight of the reason I wanted to do this in the first place. So, yes, I’d like to have something that looks nice and is organized well, and maybe even has some sort of cohesive content that people will want to read, but that should be the long game. Right now I’ve got to go back to my original plan; that is to write about anything and everything I feel like for a while. After I’ve gotten over the writers block hurdle and once I’ve figured out what aspects of blogging I enjoy, I can decide on what direction I want to go.

I guess what I’m trying to say is caveat lector¹. For now, this blog is going to resemble my desktop – a bunch of crap that may appear random, incomplete, or undeveloped, but that makes perfect sense to me.

I just stumbled upon this plug-in for Firefox that allows you to quickly clip images, text, video and almost everything else you can think of.  There’s a basic editor included so you can post to your blog without having to navigate there through your browser.  The convenience does come with some limitations.  The clipping is posted in a full width box, even though just the logo was selected for clipping.

Still, this is so easy to use I think it will end up being my main source method of posting interesting things I find when I’m not actually on the hunt for a topic.

clipped from clipmarks.com

This was originally titled Iran – Almost as Popular as Sex based on a tag cloud I had seen on wordpress.com. By the time I had opened the application to take a screen shot, Iran had moved up in ranking. Yes, more people are blogging about Iran than sex.

While the above may be nothing more indicative that the fact that when people think of sex, they aren’t necessarily using their computer time to write about it. It did remind me of an interesting article I read a while back about the popularity of blogging as a way to share political and social opinions that are restricted in print and broadcast media. The government does restrict websites and content they find objectionable, occasionally censoring a blog they don’t like. The shear number and popularity of blogging, however, would make it political suicide to shut the channels down completely. No less than 7 of the 20 most visited websites from Iran are blog hosts according to Alexa (the number may be more, I just can’t read persian in order to tell for sure). Contrast this to 1 of the top 20 accessed from the United States. Combined with social networking and file sharing sites, they account for over half of the top 20 traffic, double that of the US.

It’s interesting to me that a country westerners often think of as closed and restrictive, seems to have adopted the internet as a way to connect people in such a strong way. Of course, it’s not all that surprising in a country whose median age is 25.

This is the first try at another way of getting info into a blog – through browser plugin. I like the concept which is to be able to pull up a blog entry window whenever you see somthing you want to write about. I want to avoid becomming just a so and so said blog, but do need an easy way to bring in quotes and references.

I’m using Performancing, a plugin for Firefox. Here’s the features they like to highlight:

• Full WYSIWYG and source editing
• Save as Notes
• Add all your various blog accounts
• Technorati Support
• Delicious integration
• Trackback support
• Draft support
• Ping support
• Image upload and FTP
• Metrics stats

I’m really surprised that something built to be used from a browse doesn’t add much to it being there. For example, I copied the above list from the active window. I would have liked to have seen blockquote tags, but they’re not there. If you highlight the list in the editor and click the quote button, you still don’t get what you want. It places the opening and closing tags at the cursor insertion point not around highlighted text. Another odity is that there is no good way to add a link to the current website. Dragging the link into the editor does nothing. If you click the link button, the address is not prepopulated. In fact, you’ll have to remember to copy the url before clicking the button, as a popup window comes up and you won’t be able to copy from the browser while it is open.

Stopping testing now. 3 strikes and you’re out. Third strike you ask? You don’t know me very well.

powered by performancing firefox

MarsEdit looks like you’d expect a mac app to look. It has a very nice interface, and is fairly intuitive.

Testing out for this post, a few things to note:

• HTML tags are entered inline (no WYSIWYG), but are in blue so they are easy to identify. I actually like this.
• The HTML tag dropdown has more tags than you see online. Interestingly, they do not have the list tags. These were easy to create in the custom tags box, though.
• Includes a bookmark bar button that copies page link and name from Safari. Useful in creating shells for pages you want to blog.

This is the current leader for client side apps for me. I’m going to start using it for a while to see how I llke it.

Stumbled on this at the internet confessional known as PostSecret. The scary thing is, I can totally see someone I know doing this!