Sky’s Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation — Spreading the word in a networked world

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.
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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.

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