What does it take to get a decent full-featured blogging tool around here?
Ok… So to be fair, Flock does some pretty impressive things - it’s great to tie together all the social networks, and to share media between them without much trouble. Drag-and-Drop between Flickr streams and Facebook is pretty slick, I’ll admit.
My problem with it, though, is that it still can’t hold a candle to NetNewsWire when it comes to handling large numbers of RSS feeds. The favorites idea is great, and if I had 10-15 RSS feeds, no problem. Once you begin to get into managing hundreds of RSS feeds within 14 different groups, however, NNW really shows its RSS crunching prowess.
Taking a queue from NewsFire back in the day, NNW began to animate their program, which essentially had the effect of visually communicating to the user both where new articles existed within groups, and when they came in (by simply shifting around the groups). On top of it, either of these programs number unread articles by group and by individual feed, neither of which Flock seems to want to do. THIS… is a pain. I don’t feel like cycling through 3000 articles to find the last place I was at, nor do I want to cycle through feeds to find which one in particular had the last unread article.
Perhaps it’s a result of being up all night unable to sleep, and stuck reading article after article for school that makes me so cranky right now. However, I don’t think the answer’s as simple as this. I’m catching fuzz from people for not keeping up with emails, facebook, flickr, youtube, my own blogs, blah blah blah. I want to just grab them, shake them, and holler some sense back into their brains by way of their face: “Facebook is mainly retarded. Please stop sending me requests for vampire/werewolf data-mining games!” I’d much prefer it if I could simply blog away on my own sites, on my own servers, where I know who has control of what copyrighted material, and I know that billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch has no chance of buying the website out from under me, changing the TOS, and snagging all my personal info before I get a chance to blink. (And yes, it’s happened once already. Not to sound paranoid, but I have no intention of offering my date of birth, schooling, employment, and medical history to the likes of News Corp., thank you very much).
The bugger is, it’s become very difficult to find a decent offline blogging tool for OS X. Mars Edit development has pretty much stopped since going to Red Sweater… At least, any development of serious import. How they haven’t added a media browser *yet* to that program is unbelievable. Red Sweater Software: Some people don’t keep all their photos on Flickr… This is hardly a media resolution. Sometimes, I like to just snag a photo from iPhoto, and drop in randomly on a page. Accommodate me!!!
…. Ok, yeah… definitely the lack of sleep that’s making me crabby…
Anyway, I’m back to Ecto2, waiting feverishly for Ecto3 to be completed…. There’s gotta be some open-sourced blogging program for a guy who just wants to sit down and start banging out words for the whole world to see. Something besides these iWeb/RapidWeaver type one-size-fits-all template generators. They’re great for mom and dad, but what if i need to work on a website with more than one writer? (Here’s to wishfully thinking that the rest of the Singh family would take part in developing this site. You Guys! Get on here!)
Anyway, if anyone has any good suggestions for offline blogging apps, please let me know. Whenever I google for the term, all I get is Ecto2, MarsEdit, and Flock. None of these fit quite right. Looking for something cleaner and more sensible… Kind of like what LInkinus did for IRC on the Mac.
Anyway, on a brighter note: I’ll be going to sleep listening to a band Meena directed me to by way of her Last.fm channel. She’s got great musical taste. Friend up with her and see!
Listening to: N.Y. Hotel from the album “The Knife” by The Knife
Tags: Uncategorized, blogging, ecto, insomnia, software // Add Comment »
