So, yeah, I entered Lent planning to keep on blogging…and immediately discovered that my plan to avoid reading blogs during had engendered a lack of enthusiasm for setting down with my computer. Thus, it’s been two weeks since I last made a blog post, on either blog. It’s been a nice rest, but it’s beginning to feel self-indulgent. I think it’s time to get back in harness.
For tonight, that means Blogging Aquinas; look for a post there in a while.
May the Good Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, this day and all of the days of the year!
We’re trying to get it fixed.
Update: It’s better now.
Just for the record, I’ve completely abandoned Ecto and have adopted (and paid for) MarsEdit. I’ve still not heard back from the Ecto developer who wanted to know what problems I was seeing; and on the other hand MarsEdit has been performing flawlessly, and has become a sort of faithful companion.
So happens I’m off on a business trip this week, to the wilds of New Mexico, where they make sopapillas! I ought not be eating sopapillas on my diet, but you can’t get them here, and I haven’t had one since a brief sojourn in Santa Fé eight years ago. I intend to indulge.
Business trips being what they are, blogging will be pretty much non-existent here through the end of the week, the more so as I will be trying to continue working through one chapter of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae per day over at Blogging Aquinas. Hope to see you there.
I’ve been using MarsEdit daily since I first wrote about it last week, and I have to say it’s working for me. It’s been absolutely bullet-proof, with no unpleasant surprises at all.
That post did get a comment from one of the Ecto maintainers, asking me to e-mail him so that we could talk about the problems I’m having with Ecto; I sent him an extensive e-mail about the specific problems I’m having with the latest version, and have not yet heard back.
I’m trying some new blogging software, a package called MarsEdit. For a long time now I’ve been moving back and forth between the built-in WordPress interface and a Mac app called Ecto. I like Ecto; it gives me a WYSIWYG view of the post, and lets me edit and save a local copy of the post. But it’s buggy. The WYSIWYG editor has some annoying quirks; and every once in a while the app simply shuts down, usually when I’ve asked it to post a draft to the weblog. If I had previously saved a local copy of the post, that’s only annoying; but usually I discover that I had neglected to do so.
Since the most important thing I want from using a standalone blog client is reliability (keeping all of my drafts on the server scares me), this means that Ecto is, for all its nice features, less useful than the WordPress web interface. So yesterday I went looking for other possibilities, and the only one that really looked like it might do is the aforementioned MarsEdit.
On the face of it, MarsEdit is very similar to Ecto, but lacks a few features. It doesn’t have WYSIWYG editing; you edit in HTML. On the other hand, that also means it doesn’t have Ecto’s weird editing quirks, and I’m pretty comfortable with HTML. Also, it doesn’t have Ecto’s “Amazon” tool, which makes it really easy to create nice links to book pages on Amazon’s web site, a feature I only started using a week or so ago. It does have a reasonably nice “Preview” feature, though; and it has nice HTML editing, with syntax-highlighting and customizable key commands; and so far it’s been rock solid.
I’ve already paid for Ecto; and the latest Beta (though still buggy and quirker) is much nicer than the previous version I’d been using. MarsEdit is more expensive (about $30). I’m going to continue to use it through the 30-day trial period, and then we’ll see.
So now you know why I’ve not been blogging all that much over the past year; there’s just been a bunch of stuff in my head that I wasn’t ready to broadcast. The “Watching the Tiber Go By” series wasn’t nearly all of it; there are lots of books I’ve read that I might want to comment on, and lots of related things I’ve been thinking that I might want to write about.
So what should readers expect to see in this space in the future? Good grief, I dunno. More of the sort of thing I’ve been writing for the last N years, I expect, with likely more content related to matters of faith. There will be book reviews, and all manner of foolishness, quite likely. And with any luck, I’ll be posting more frequently as well.
I’m off on a business trip at “O-dark-thirty” tomorrow morning, and won’t be back until the end of the week. I might blog something between now and then, but probably not. I just wanted to assure everyone that I’m not going to gone for another six months.
Hmmm. My last post was in May, and it’s now the end of July. ‘Twasn’t my intent to remain silent for so long, but I’ve been travelling a lot on business, and we went on vacation, and, well, I guess I’ve been busy. I’m beginning to feel like it’s time to get back in harness again, though perhaps somewhat differently than before. For over ten years, I reviewed virtually every book I read, often in some detail. I’m not sure I want to do that, anymore; but on the other hand I’ve been reading an awful lot, and sometimes I find that there are things I’d like to say. We’ll see how it goes.
The View from the Foothills 