Category: Flock

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Dinking with things that dink with content

I’ve been cramming a lot into my brain over the past few days. For one thing, I’ve been exploring the lovely world of Drupal. After all the things I’ve seen and heard about it, I’ve been impressed. It’s everything that it’s said to be. Content management system, and they ain’t kidding.

I set it up locally and played quite a bit yesterday. Every time I tried to do something that would be complicated by doing it stupidly, Drupal had some sort of built-in way to do what I wanted. Very interesting. Not sure that I like it from a blogging aspect, but it has that too. It can be oh so much more.

I’m experimenting with WordPress more and more. I’ve been a long time user of the visual rich editor. However, not anymore. It’s come to be such a pain, and the WYSIWYG interface gets so annoying after a while. Being a user of only version 2.0 and on, this is what previous versions did. I’ve gotta say that I like this, non-rich editor, much more. Loads faster in FireFox and has no lag. I’ll stick with this for now.

I did find a really great Flickr plugin for WordPress. Flickr Photo Album adds a nice interface for dropping images from your Flickr account straight into a post, all from within the editor. You can already do this with Flock, but I am still not impressed with its performance. This plugin makes things simple and quick, but the setup takes a little to sort out.

I also got into some Unix[wiki] junk last night. Seems that my external hard drive has the occasional ability of renaming itself at random times and confusing some of my peer to peer programs. How else are we to have our cheap nights in with some ghetto Tivo, aka BitTorrent? This could also cause problems with some of my podcast projects. If I spent enough time with it, Unix could become another language I could start to really understand. I’ve got way too many other things on the list right now. I should get some tape for the middle of my glasses.

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Making a switch over to Firefox

Screenshot of my Firefox setup Being the Apple fan that I publicly am, I’ve also been very partial to Safari.  That changed the other day when I launched Firefox while just being curious about how it stacks up to my “usual” browser.

I really like Safari.  That being said, in the past few days, I am not longer using it as my default browser.  The element I really liked about Safari was the RSS feature.  After numerous, spinning beach balls(Apple users will know what I’m talking about), I grew tired of how it behaved.

It’s annoying and time wasting to have that happen.  RSS was made to make getting info more simple and quick.  On top of that, Safari does not fully support WordPress.  So for creating my posts, I ran Camino along side Safari in order to use the “quicktags” feature in WP.  You can’t use that in Safari, so posting with that browser reverts back to manually typing up HTML code as well as your text. Can you see the headache going on here?

I also experimented, briefly, with making Flock my standard browser, if not something to use in conjuntion with Safari and replacing Camino.  I can’t say that I was overly happy with its performance, RSS interface, and overall feel.  I still think that it’s a great browser, but the development needs to keep going on it until I would be comfortable using it full time.  Maybe it’s something to keep revisiting as the built-in blogging and photo sharing support is pretty cool.

That being said, I think I am 80% with being fully converted into using Firefox.  The ability of using plugins has already found me pretty happy.  Using Tab Mix Plus and Wizz RSS News Reader has me feeling even more efficient than I did with Safari.  Additionally, I’ve changed the theme to make it look more like Safari.  That might sound sad to some folks, but having it look like how I’m used to made the change all the more easier.

Pages load quicker than before, and I mean that by being more snappy.  Clicking on a RSS article has the page load in a few seconds.  And if I want to blog about something I read, I open a new tab and make a post.  Even publishing a podcast gets easier because if I need to search for info to add a link into the show notes, eveything is all in one.

These are just some preliminary thoughts about the switch.  I have to say that I’m pleased with how easy it was, but my experience with doing these things might be more than the average user.  For now, I’m sticking with Firefox.