My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine.
Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon.
The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit, but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMTL code. No thanks, sometimes my own philosophical code is about all I can handle. I had high hopes of using the Mail program, which has a very nice interface. However - it generates a slew of formating code that plays havoc with my posts, and as the icing on the cake the links it creates disappear when posting. Performancing, the Firefox extention, is pretty slick, but is a browser window and that raises the save file isssue. I also looked at Nvu, the open source HTML composer that had it's origins in the Mozilla suite. That might be promising in the future but right now it's a bit slow and I don't know what information FTP blogger.com wants in order to let me use it.
There is also the issue of some frustration that I have had with blogger over the years - lost posts, template corruption and the like. I started to look around at other hosts and while I've made no decision yet, I find Wordpress intriguing. The templates look better to my eyes, and the posting / management interfce is certainly more sophisticated. Here is what I have created so far. I think it looks alright but it needs some images to give it some personality and life but I see no way to edit the template. I know some Wordpress blogs are customized but I suspect that these are running the software themselves. The documentation for Wordpress is extensive and I have not been able to sort this issue out yet and it is something that I need to resolve. If I move I plan to take my blogrolls with me and for that I'll need access to the template. At least, I think that's so.
I haven't yet tried using Mail to write to Wordpress. It would be great if that worked because in my efforts to use Mail I did manage to create an posting app with Automator. I suspect, however, that the browser window is the way of the future given all of the growth in web services we've seen in the last year.
Comments on Wordpress service would be most welcome. Perhaps someone can tell me why the Wordpress composer does not work in Safari or Camino, but does in Firefox. I know that Safari uses KHTML instead of Gecko, but Camino is Geko and it's no better.
Isn't technology grand!
Comments