Learning New Stuff 


Learning about blogging tools, and about iBlog and what you can do with it.  

All of a sudden, I've leaped into the blogosphere. I guess the real start was an article in Macworld The Best Blogging Tools for the Mac. Until I read this article, I only new that blogging was a big new thing. So in the course of reading about hosted and nonhosted tools and learning about TypePad, Blogspot and Blogger and WordPress, I came across this little note about iBlog from Lifli Products. It doesn't permit comments, but does permit feedback emails, and can be used in conjunction with a .Mac subscription. Since I have been using .Mac for some time, I downloaded and installed iBlog 1.4.5 from the Apple website, free for .Mac users. Well, if it turns out to expire, I will buy it for the $19.95. This is a good program. And it has taught me a ton about blogging.

I guess you're at my blog now, so there's no point in giving you the URL. But I can tell you that iBlog is very intuitive to use, I just fell right into it into an hour or two. It lets you select one of five canned designs for your blog, but if you know programming, you can improve on it. Also, it lets you name your blog (you can create multiple blogs), create categories within each blog, and entries within each category. Making a blog entry is basically just like using a word processor, but you can add a few things such as hyperlinks (as I'm doing in this entry). Later I am going to get into the music, photos and maybe even movies.

And then a couple of days later, I discovered another amazing thing about iBlog. It becomes a newsreader. Now suddenly I can get all the major newsfeeds from like CNN and BBC and also there are suggested feeds in the newsfeed pane which I will talk about in a minute. The thing about newsfeeds is that they are written in XML instead of HTML. Hence, they will come up in your browser, but not all browsers will display them in a convenient way. I'm looking forward to my upgrade to Tiger soon, because I understand that Safari 2.0 incorporates newsfeeds into it. But for the time being I can use iBlog to keep up on the news.

And furthermore, I can begin to keep up on well-known and not so well-known bloggers. I've known about Andrew Sullivan for a long time, the conservative gay activist. Now I've visited his blog. Another person I didn't know about was Douglas Rushkoff, a high tech maven and rather interesting cartoonist. Now I've seen his blog. I'm still exploring how you identify bloggers of like and not-so-like mind. For example, the other day I found a liberal web ring of blogs, called, of all things, Liberal Blogs. I've visited several of these, not all are of equal interest.

I guess some people would regard it as a downside to iBlog that it doesn't permit comments, but actually, after having read some of the garbage and inanity that gets published in response to some blogger's thoughtful piece, I'm kind of glad that I don't have to monitor all the comments that come in. (Not that my weblog has been crashing from the overload :0) If someone wants to, they can write to me, and if I want to, I can put these comments in another entry on the blog and comment on them.

I am including this in a new category called Tech Dreck, but I could have put it in the I'm WHO? slot. Because, I'm never having more fun than when I'm learning a lot about and getting to use new technology.  

Posted: Mon - October 24, 2005 at 12:00 PM          

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