A New Toy

Well. I have a new toy to play with.

I love software. It’s no secret. Every time I find a new piece of software to play with, so long as it’s free or I can get it for free (ahem), I’ll try it. Within limits. of course, but for the most part, I’m a slut for software.

So I’ve experimented with a couple of email clients over the last couple years. Mozilla Thunderbird, for one. It was okay. At the time I installed it and tried it, it was not only free and not difficult to use, it was the only one which connected to almost all my email accounts. Yahoo mail, of course, is a problem child. They won’t let you connect unless you pay for their email, which stinks, and I won’t do it. So phooey on them.

Anyway, I’ve avoided using Thunderbird because it’s slow (to me), cumbersome, and doesn’t handle Gmail accounts well. Frustrated, I gave up on it. It was easier to use my little WebMail Notifier addon for Firefox than it was to use Thunderbird, and that just defeats the purpose.

So tonight, I lamented to my wife about how much I wanted to be able to work offline and still get my email. My feed readers and other things interfere with actual work I have to do lately, and I need to curtail how much time I spend on the Internet. So I wanted an offline client to check ALL my email. If I sign on to Firefox I’m going to end up losing a couple of hours. I’m undisciplined.

She spent a while searching and offered me two potential clients. One specialized in Gmail, but I have other accounts I want to check too. So I held that on the back burner. Then she told me about Threadsy. Okay, it’s great – she can tell you about it if you’re interested – but I wanted to stay off the browser, not work in it. So strike that.

Then she showed me one she loved. It used to be Microsoft Outlook Express. Now, it’s called Windows Live. It’s incredible.

First, it accepted all my Gmail accounts without problem. There’s a setting in Gmail you need to use to permit IMAPI access, then you’re good to go. It naturally took my Hotmail account without even asking. But it also offered to establish subscriptions for my RSS feeds. That means I could read your blogs, my comments and almost anything else providing an RSS feed, right here in my little Live window.

OH, heaven!

Now, I haven’t set up the subscriptions to either my RSS feeds or any newsgroups. But I have established all my email accounts and got them going. Live was so clever it took the ridiculous tags Gmail uses instead of folders, called labels, and it turned them into folders all by itself for me. So if I’m overwhelmed looking at my Inbox, I don’t have to filter the mail and risk forgetting to remove that filter later. I can just click in the folder of choice and see all the mail in those folders. And as email comes in I can just move it to the appropriate folder and it’s out of my way; then it syncs everything up on the mail server too and voila! My email is solved!

So, if you’re a Windows user, and you like Thunderbird or are on Outlook Express stubbornly refusing to upgrade, you need to look at this. The software’s free; it’s fast; it’s simple to use and set up; it’s interface is clean and intuitive. It’s fantastic, and I don’t generally rave about email clients. But I give this one two thumbs up and can’t wait to dig farther into it to see what else it can do.

Interested? You can download it here. It also offers to install a bunch of other stuff too, but you don’t have to take ‘em. I do, however, recommend Windows Live Writer.

Have fun.

-JDT-

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Check THIS Out

Okay, so here I am, working in Microsoft Word.

That’s right, you read me right. I’m not working in Windows Live Writer, I’m working in MS Word. And I’m posting to my blog right from Word.

I kid you not. This is one of the features of Word. I had no idea. It’s “teh awesome” as the kidz say now.

I guess it’s been a while since I did anything with a seriously current version of Word, but I have to tell you this is pretty amazing. I can get all the powerful editing features of MS Word, like its grammar check utility, its spell checker, the formatting options … and yet, I can post directly to the blog of my choice from a variety of providers. I can manage my blog accounts, insert categories, and insert pictures and other items just as with other Word documents. And it will post directly to my blog when I’m finished with the nifty little “Publish” button.

Pretty cool, no?

Now, there are other things I can see it won’t do. Such things as insert tags, or do the auto-linking which is such an integral part of my love for Windows Live Writer. But for those of us who love to post fiction and poetry on our blogs, using a late-model version of Word so you can have the editing power of a full-featured word processor and some of the capabilities of a blogging desktop client.

Pretty doggone sweet.

This isn’t going to replace WLW for me by any stretch of the imagination. Not a prayer. I have too many other things in WLW I’ve come to depend on for me to want to do that, and Word makes me work a lot harder after hitting the publishing button to get things right. But it’s a pretty cool way to get a blog post done, and if you’re someone who’s wanted the capabilities of a word processing software package to do your blogging, this might be the real deal.

Just another cool toy to play with, so I figured I’d give you all a shout-out about it.

Hope you’re having a great day.

-JDT-

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Picture This

When I first started using Zemanta, which is a nice way of gathering resources and links in a blog post, I also allowed it to provide me with pictures to use for my post.  (If you don’t know, people like pictures.  You’ll get more hits on your blog if you use ‘em than if you don’t.  Word to your head, yo.)  And that was fine.

Then I found out I could do cooler things and maybe find better pictures, which don’t require caption editing, if I used the great oracle Google or similar to find my pictures.  So I started doing that.  And things were fine.

Then I discovered a Polaroid Picture add-on for Windows Live Writer.  It allowed me to pick my own picture, insert it into my post, tilt it right or left if I wanted, and add my own caption, and some other special effects too.  And things were wonderful.

Then something changed.  Every picture I found on the Internet, no matter what the dimensions of the picture were, became a postage stamp-sized tile on my blog post.  I could resize the picture of course, but only at my peril.  The pixelation indicated this wasn’t viable after all, not if I wanted the picture to be recognizable and, in some cases, have the text be legible.

What do to?  What to DO?!

I’ve done what I can to pick the appropriate size.  I even went so far as to check with other search engines to see if the one I used did something to the images when they saved.  Nothin’.  Always tiny.

What to do?  What to DO?!

Well, I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.  I have no clue where to find the nice, clear, large images I can shrink to the perfect size anymore.  Maybe my search terms have gone stale.  Maybe I’m not being creative enough.  Maybe this is Internet censorship at work.  Maybe it’s a conspiracy to stop me from getting the hits I so desperately need and deserve.  Maybe there’s someone trying to keep me from getting popular and they’ve sabotaged my ability to download perfect pictures.  Whatever the case (and none of those are the case), I just can’t get the good sized pictures I once had.

So, do the posts suffer because they don’t have a picture?  Do I need one?  Do you enjoy the posts as much without them?

Sound off, let me know.  Don’t wanna work harder than I have to, y’know?

-JDT-

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3 Good Blogging Desktop Clients

 

I’ve talked about blogging clients before — you can see all of them on my Software Review Page if you’re interested — but over the weekend, Sara asked me how to insert a table to help her organize some links on one of her pages.

The table is a nice way to collect multiple links in a neat, orderly fashion. It allows people to see groups of related posts or articles in a clean, easy-to-see way. But putting a table on a WordPress page can be tricky, because WP doesn’t have a built-in table function in its visual post editor. So, what’s a person who’s unfamiliar with HTML code to do?

Use a blogging client, of course.

For those who don’t know or haven’t gotten sick of my repetitious harping about it yet, blogging clients are software pieces which are installed either locally, on your computer, or integrated into your browser. They typically offer better feature sets than the standard built-in blog editors from most blog hosts, and allow you to do all the really cool things you’d like: Make tables (in this case), change post date and time (I write all of my posts at least a few hours ahead of their posting time), format, split posts (most of them), edit HTML directly (if you’re into that sort of thing), change formatting on fonts like colors, size, and typeface, image insertion and handling, editing old posts, and much more. It makes blogging easy and allows you to focus on content. Which is why you blog, right?

So, here are my three favorite blog clients. I prefer the offline blogging client model, which means, you can write your post in these clients and publish them without being on the Internet. With online blogging clients or the built-in editors, you need to work within your browser. I like the option of not having to use the browser to compose my entries, so these are the ones I’ll focus on.

Pages: 1 2 3

Strange Days

I had a great story to tell you, about my childhood.  A memory which flashed cold and clear through my head like a mountain run-off streaming down to a frothing, roiling river in the Rocky Mountains.

Oh, I had the grabbing opening line, I had the pacing and detail planned, I had the length culled to the proper format for the venue.  I had the wording forming on my fingertips, I could almost see your responses – those who would, anyway – and I had everything ready to go.  I knew what triggered it, what ricocheting bullet in my brain rattled it from its deep nest in a flurry of mental feathers like a grouse or pheasant startled from the brush.  I had everything planned and ready to go.

Then it was gone.

I lost it.  Just like that.  In the time it took for me to get started with my day on Saturday and the time when I launched my lovely Windows Live Writer, I’d lost everything.  Everything!

*Sigh*

So today, what do I have to post for you?  What tale will I tell you?  What song shall I sing you?

You just read it.  Hope you had a great weekend.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

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