Musings from Mars » Blogging

iBlog: Major Update to Blogging Tool in the Works

admin — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 23:04:35 +0000

In search for civility online, is the Golden Rule the answer?

admin — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 03:09:01 +0000

MarsEdit: Blogging Software Gets An Update

admin — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 01:55:37 +0000

myBlog: Blogging Software Worth Passing By

admin — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 01:22:58 +0000

Snippet Mind: Organize and Layout Your Diary

admin — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 20:39:54 +0000

Journler: Highly Rated Freeware Notebook Supports Multimedia TooÂ Â

admin — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 01:31:24 +0000

Mephisto: New Blog Software Makes A Splash

admin — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 01:19:29 +0000

Unobtrusive AJAX Star Rating Bar

admin — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 23:39:14 +0000

PulpFiction: Advanced News Reader/Aggregator for Mac OS X

Leland Scott — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 01:36:56 +0000

BlogAssist: Menubar Help in Formatting HTML

Leland Scott — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:54:22 +0000

AjaxWp: Turning WordPress Blogs Into Ajax Blogs

admin — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 17:09:18 +0000

MODx: Ajax-Enabled PHP-Powered CMS

admin — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 02:10:55 +0000

Bloginfluence Shows You How Unimportant You Really Are

Leland Scott — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 20:19:59 +0000

Mambo: Best Open Source CMS?

admin — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 16:01:31 +0000

ShortStat Widget: For Your Stat-Checkin’ Addiction)

Leland Scott — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 21:19:08 +0000

Feed2JS: Feed to Javascript

Leland Scott — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 07:40:25 +0000

Ajaxian: All Things Ajax Blog

Leland Scott — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:33:26 +0000

Mooflex Beta: Ajax/Web 2.0 Content Management System

Leland Scott — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 21:19:42 +0000

Practical Help with WordPress Loops

Leland Scott — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 04:23:30 +0000

Using prototype.js: Unofficial Reference

Leland Scott — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 21:31:57 +0000

mir.aculo.us: Father of Script.aculo.us

Leland Scott — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 21:26:48 +0000

llor.nu: Wouldja believe a web 2.0 boardgame?

Leland Scott — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 21:24:04 +0000

Nucleus CMS: Pure Publishing

Leland Scott — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 23:03:40 +0000

My Delicious NetNewsWire

Leland Scott — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 22:26:37 +0000

Well, That Took Longer Than I Thought!

admin — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 03:52:04 +0000

This is a tale of two blogs: Blogger, and WordPress. When I looked around for blogging tools and software last March, I settled on Blogger (now owned by Google) because it looked like I could get up and running very quickly. And I did! I don't think it took me more than a week to customize an existing template and choose the few options available to get something I was pleased with. Blogger is kind of like Apple's .mac HomePage tool... mostly, you just point and click and make the best of the few options you have. Still, with very little effort you can end up with something that looks very professional. In my review of tools, I noted wistfully the powerful features of WordPress and Movable Type. As a guy who likes to program and play with code--especially with PHP and MySQL--those two blogging systems loomed on the net like two giant chocolate ocean liners. But I knew I had to be strong and ignore them, in order to get the blog up with a minimum of effort.

At the time, I also looked at desktop blogging tools and settled on Ecto, which I've been very pleased with. My only complaint is that Ecto's developer updates the software so often I'm always having to download new versions! But it's not really much of a complaint, since I'm very happy the tool keeps getting better. So, with Blogger and Ecto in hand, I happily began writing down many things, delighting in my newfound ability to express my rants in a more disciplined form. As the number of articles grew, however, I started bumping up against the one feature of Blogger that bothered me in the beginning: No categories. As of this writing, Blogger offers no way to organize posts into categories or to tag them with keywords. This is a pretty serious deficiency, but it only has an impact after you've written more than a dozen posts or so, or if you've started covering more than one subject area.