Poet Ponders the Digital

Blogger was amazing when I first began blogging in  2004 . That’s right, there are posts on my blogs dating to the year Google relaunched the platform. Today, Blogger isn’t so great. It feels old and out-dated. But it works and I have hundreds of posts on five Blogger-hosted blogs (1334 as of tonight). The idea of exporting and importing 13 years of posts into WordPress or Medium scares me. Should I migrate? I do not know. I’m preparing to start podcasting in 2018 and it would much easier to create podcast feeds and links within WordPress. Blogger themes? They stink, and customizing or creating your own is a pain. I don’t like the choices, yet I don’t have the time to tweak the themes as much as I want. Even the tweaks I have made are lost too often - and that annoys me. Blogger’s editor? It stinks. So does the formatting of posts with line breaks in place of paragraphs. Google could surely make Blogger an HTML5-compliant platform or at least use something mo...

MarsEdit and Blogger are not cooperating, and I’m uncertain if I will use MarsEdit past the trail period. Currently, what the application offers me is a way to compose drafts outside of Apple Mail, but it isn’t offering me much more than that because I use Google’s blogging platform. Annoyances that require using a menu choice, instead of the Option pane: Date should be included with “Post Status” for scheduling purposes. Enclosure settings should be within the editor window, along with Title. Bullet lists should be a default formatting choice, as they are common. More serious annoyances: Paragraphs require two blank lines, even in Rich Text mode, or you must clean the code within Blogger. Images do not function properly, no matter how many experiments I have tried.  I’m not saving much time if I still need to carefully format a post in Blogger and insert images from within Google’s interface. MarsEdit prefers WordPress, without a doubt. For Blogger, MarsEdit ...

MarsEdit (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Mailing posts to blogs, a practice I adopted in 2005, allows a blogger like me to store copies of draft posts within email. If Blogger , WordPress, or the blogging platform of the moment crashes or for some other reason eats my posts, at least I have the original drafts of most entries. I find having such a nicely organized archive convenient — much easier than remembering to archive posts from Blogger or WordPress to my computer. With this post, I am testing MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software based on recent reviews, including an overview on 9to5Mac . Composing posts an email offers a fast way to prepare draft blogs, but the email does not always work well if you want to include basic formatting, images, and links to online resources. Submitting to Blogger via Apple Mail often produced complex HTML with unnecessary font and paragraph formatting styles. Problems with rich text led me to convert blog entries to plaintext in Apple Mail ...

In the last few days my wife and I have fought Blogger and SurveyMonkey. For two applications that are used by a lot of people, especially writers and academics, the applications are horrible. When an engineer and computer programmer can't figure out the choices to accomplish basic tasks, something is wrong. I have used Blogger for several years. This is a great platform, but some of the tools need improvement. The help to accomplish tasks leaves much to be desired. We wanted to create a multi-author blog. While we were able to get the setup to allow anyone to post, the author name was always the same. It took several passes through the settings to realize you needed to create special "inbox" addresses for each author. Sure, it was a logical fix once we realized the issue, but it wasn't obvious on the surface. That's not good. Also, the editor has some problems with formatted e-mail. I wish the editor were more like Google's Doc application. ...

Blog post: describe the search methods and databases you employ to collect information for use in your writing; how do you determine the validity and credibility of the information you acquire and how you categorized and organize that information for use in writing; how might you use RSS feeds to Bloglines or Google Reader to enhance your students how could you improve your students’ search strategies (see the Teachers Teaching Teachers site) Work on your vlog This week we are being asked to consider two very different topics, so I'm going to split my response accordingly. However, I'm also going to take a detour, which isn't that unusual for me. I like detours. [rant] Knowing a blog is for a course, especially a course on teaching writing/composition using online technologies, leads to blog posts that are anything but "bloggy" in nature. Instead of a wry wit or wandering observations, the writing feels controlled — mediated by the context to the point it is an...