Safari has found a new user

This weekend, I began playing around with Safari. I’ve had it installed on both my computers for months but I’ve never used it for anything more than to check the usability of my websites in the browser. Friday, I decided to really give it a test run, and I was very surprised to find that I really liked the way it made websites and fonts look.

I’ve been using Firefox for years and for a while, I was using a lot of plugins. That isn’t the case these days, though, so there isn’t really much I’m missing from just the basic install of the Safari browser as compared to Firefox. 

Now, I admit, my decision to keep using Safari is at the moment based entirely on how things look. :) Maybe that’s not the best reason to switch browsers, but it works for me right now.

Have you used Safari lately? What do you think of it? Is there anything I should know about it?

Update: One problem I’ve discovered is the inability to right-click on an image and see the properties for it. Is there some other way easy way to find that info in Safari?I actually use this quite a lot with bookcovers I get from publishers!

Looking for a blogging application for my Palm OS phone

I don’t have cell phone service at my home. I have service about a mile in either direction from my home, but I sit in a lovely little dead zone that refuses to disappear as phones get fancier. However, I do love my new data service for accessing my websites and email when I’m away from home. I would love to be able to blog while I’m out and about too, but so far I haven’t found a blogging application that I’m comfortable using to actually post to my blog, not just create drafts–although drafts are nice!

If you know of a good blogging application I can use with my Palm OS device, I would love to know about it. Just leave a comment here and I thank you greatly for your help!

Testing ScribeFire because someone recommended it to me

ScribeFire is an in-browser blogging tool that lets you write posts, edit posts, and post posts to your blog. Too many posts? Maybe so, but the tool seems promising. I’ve installed it in the past, but never did get round to really using it. At that time I had only a few blogs. I still had a lot of domains, but I hadn’t discovered what a perfect combination blogging was for me. Writing, designing, coding—I get to do it all with blogs, and much quicker than with my static websites.

I’m going to try out many more of the features of ScribeFire before I decide if I want to make it my blogging tool of choice. Although I really liked Windows Live Writer, which I previously blogged about, I haven’t found myself favoring it over the plain ol’ administrator interface in WordPress. WordPress’s admin interface is good—really good and about the only thing I can complain about in it is how not-easy it is to work with images.

See the screenshot? That’s me writing this post. The interface splits the browser window with whatever you happen to have open in the window. Any links you make will default to the address of the open page, although you can overwrite that link.

Truthfully, though, adding that image wasn’t really an easier than doing it in the admin interface, and the image editing capabilities of ScribeFire don’t seem to be even as nice as those in the WordPress admin.

So, back to WordPress for my posts!

Testing Windows Live Writer Because I Love Trying Software

I’ve decided I would like to try out a couple of different programs that might help me spend more time writing on my blog and less time logging in to the different admin panels. One of my favorite pieces of software was w.bloggar, but I stopped using it when I couldn’t add tags and stuff with it. Maybe I just didn’t know all the tricks but the software seemed to limit what I could do in a way that the WordPress admin interface didn’t.

I still like the idea of a consolidated area for my writing. I feel the same about my fiction. I tried out lots of different software, even writing a couple of books with different programs, but ultimately, I settled on one and imported all my fiction into it.

I’ve tried Live Writer before and I liked it, but I had a couple of weird issues with the particular blog I used it on. The categories disappeared from the WP admin where you add them to a post. They didn’t reappear until I upgraded to a new version after a complete deletion of the old files. Previous upgrades where I just overwrote the old files didn’t do anything to fix the problem.

Anyway, I’m being brave here and giving it another shot. :-) So, there you go. This post is coming directly from Live Writer.