Blogging Again

I have been an intermittent blogger for the couple of years. I started by trying to run my own software on my own site, not wanting to be beholding to some mega corporation who would own all my data. This endeavour was short lived as I came to realise how much effort there was to preventing your servers space being filled up with adverts for Viagra.

I have toyed with other sites over the last year and in almost all cases failed to post the things I wanted to post. The main impediment to this is my own idleness. I often have bright ideas, things I want to get off my chest or just read something that I feel the need to comment on. Half the time though I am not near my computer or I just don’t open that other browser window and log in cos my network is rubbish (depends where I am working) or access is restricted.

I then began just keeping notes on my handheld (a TapWave Zodiac ) This device was great and I managed to get it for an absolute steal when they stopped production (about £100 compared to the quoted £250). I used tejpwriter almost exclusively for its brilliant thumb board which made writing quick notes really easy on the device. (it does some quite cool encryption too if you don’t want casual snoops reading your stuff). This is where the idleness causes a problem as I would be left with a build up of notes and rants on the Tapwave that I would invariably not upload straightway when I got home as I would have to copy them on to my computer and paste them into a web page etc. As a result the old blog became a bit stale and I lost interest (even if I did keep up with the personal notes).

After using the Tapwave quite heavily for a couple of years it started to show it’s age, the limited connectivity (no WiFi) started to bug me and I needed a new toy. The product evaluation phase lasted a few months as I debated between a Palm TX (wifi/familliar os), Archos 604 WiFi (well it had WiFi and a browser and looked cool) or a Nokia N800 (WiFi, cool looks, Open Source).

I went for the N800 as it did everything I needed and more with a great thumb board for when I am adding notes, fold out blue tooth keyboard for when I want to write more and more additional software than you can shake a stick at from mameo.org. Having settled into a routine now with my new toy I thought I would re-visit the world of blogging see what I could do from this great device. Enter WordPy. This software allows me to just take notes where ever I am now and makes it very easy to upload them to here as soon as I get home directly from my N800 via my Wifi Link so there should be no more excuses. Unfortunately as my older rants were on LiveJournal and that isn’t supported by WordPy I have moved home to here (besides that blog had become stale and I can always re-post anything from there).

In case anyone is wondering I am not actually typing this on my N800 at the moment as I have also started playing with Drivel which solves my other problem of where to write things down when I am in an office with limited connectivity but actually have my laptop with me to use. I know I could just use any text editor but with Drivel I can type things in and save a Draft and then just load it when I am able to post it without messing about with re-formatting or cutting and pasting.

Its a bit of a long introduction really but it just provides some background to the trials and tribulations of a casual blogger and how they can be surmounted.