Where Past Meets Future
I first posted about Ecto back in May, and, after much playing with the demo for OSX, I have bitten the bullet and purchased a copy. The more I use Ecto, the more powerful I realise it is. I will post a full review here in the days to come, but I really couldn’t recommend it enough. Even the support forums for Ecto are checked regularly by the author.
Check back soon for my review.
Technorati Tags: ecto, blogging, wysiwyg
As news of yesterday’s bombings in London came through, the BBC News website slowly ground to a halt as millions of people logged on to see what was happening. I decided to follow the events through the day via the blogging community, and it gave a great ‘bottom-up’ view of the happenings, often half an hour before information filtered onto the mainstream websites.
Technorati Tags: London, blogging, bomb
Continue reading ‘Blogging the London bombings’
A nice chap called Nigel Kersten has written a nifty little widget for Apple OSX Tiger’s Dashboard called RapidMetaBlog. It’s nicely designed, in terms of look and functionality. Panes slide out from the compact widget, allowing plenty of space to write your post (I’m writing this in it), and another pane slides out from the post to show a preview.
RapidMetaBlog supports categories, essential functionality if you like to keep a tight structure on your blog. When writing your post, you have to use HTML, but for simple jottings, it’s very handy indeed. All you need is paragraph tags (remember to close them!), and perhaps an href here and there. You can’t insert images at this time (unless they’re already online, and you know the URI), but then this is supposed to be a widget, not a full-featured weblog editor like Ecto or MarsEdit.
I’ll post some screenshots later.
You can download RapidMetaBlog from Nigel’s blog or from Dashboard Widgets.
Continue reading ‘RapidMetaBlog’
For those of you who are new to the world of Blogging, it is a form of personal web publishing, allowing people to easily post information and comment about whatever they please. This blog is powered by a web application called WordPress, a fantastic system (although not for someone who is not familiar with the dark arts of website hosting) for running a small website.
Recently, an upgrade was issued to WordPress, bringing the version up to 1.5.1, promising lots of bug fixes and performance enhancements. I took the plunge, and a day later, I realised my RSS feed had ceased to be, throwing up an HTTP 304 error. Damn. A quick visit to the helpful folks on the WordPress support forums showed a number of people had the same problem and a fix had been issued. Basically, you need to download the patch, which is a file named “wp-blog-header.php”, and replace your old copy with it (after having backed it up or renamed it, of course!). I duly did this, and hey presto! A working RSS feed again.
Or is it? A quick check of this feed on Feed Validator, shows the error
line 69, column 3: content:encoded should not contain onclick tag (2 occurrences) [help] ]]>
line 69, column 3: content:encoded should not contain relative URL references (4 occurrences) [help] ]]>
Stumped! I’ll get on to the support forums and see if anyone can help out. In the meantime, apologies if you’re having a spot of bother with the feeds. SharpReader on Windows, and NetNewsWire on OSX don’t seem to have a problem with it, but some RSS parsers do (e.g. Carp and Magpie). If I do find a fix, I’ll post it here.