10th May 2007
What we call walking or hillwalking in the U.K. goes under the banners of hiking, tramping and yomping in other parts of the world. One term that we share with other parts is backpacking and this is much bigger in the U.S. than it is in the U.K. My hillwalking blog has come to the attention of members of the hillwalking and backpacking community and WordPress’s logging of who visited my blog has alerted me to this and allowed to find other similar blogs.
Why have I mentioned this here? The reason is that it has allowed me to see what blogging software others have been using. Blogger seems to be a very popular choice with a number using Windows Live Spaces, in the process making me aware that Microsoft has dipped its toes into the hosted blogs space. Other than this, I have also seen Typepad being used and one or two self-hosted operations to boot, mine included. Intriguingly, I have yet to encounter a fellow hillwalking fan in the U.K. using WordPress.com to host a hill blog, but I do know of a German backpacker having one. Video blogging is used by some, with the ever pervasive YouTube becoming a staple for this, at least for the ones that I have seen.
It’s an intriguing survey that leaves me to wonder how things develop…
1st February 2007
Though it seems strange to say it, I am making good use of Word’s blogging capabilities. Having had WordPress.com’s blog editor mangle one of my posts – incidentally while using Opera as my browser - is the cause of this turn of events.
When setting up new accounts, there are a number of presets available to be used to work with major blogging providers such as Blogger, WordPress, and Typepad. This is not all, though, as it is possible to hook up to other blogs in a more generic fashion. In fact, I have able to hook up to my other WordPress-powered blog; hosted on the same server as my personal website and with all the associated programming and scripting handled by myself. Where you have a number of accounts set up in the application, a drop-down menu appears in the post so that you can select the account to be used.
Speaking of dropdown menus embedded in the post, you can add categories to a post from the blog server’s own collection, and you can have more than one in any post. This feature is a boon, as is the ability to edit posts that are already on there, yet Word only seems to show a subset of all the posts on the server, about 20 I think, rather than each one. Another caveat is that you need to use a separate window for each post, or you’ll end up overwriting posts in error. Whether this is a result of RSS feed settings or is intrinsic to Word itself remains something that I have yet to discern. As it is Word, formatting, insertion of objects such as hyperlinks and images is very much part of the package. That said, uploading images via this route was not something that I tested until I was writing this post, but it seems to work well.
Apart from the irritations discussed above, I did find Word crashing a few times, but no data got lost thanks to its seemingly excellent file recovery capabilities, a definite counterpoint to some of my experiences with Word’s file recovery feature in previous versions. Eventually, the Office Diagnostics tools kicked in to see if all was well and, after carrying out both hardware (memory, hard drive, etc.) and software checks, an installation repair was performed. Let’s see if this resolves the issue. Even so, the crash repair and diagnostics were not something that I had seen to the same extent in previous versions of Office, and they did look pretty impressive.
In summary, Word does seem to be a good blogging tool, but I wouldn’t use it on its own because of its inability to download a full list of posts for editing. A blog’s own interface will remain necessary for that. Also, Word is far from being the only “offline” blog editor out there, and I am tempted to have a look at the likes of BlogJet and w.bloggar.