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EBIG RSS Sig ‘Corporate Bloggers’ and notetaking

Yesterday Elisa Camahort presented at the EBIG SIG on RSS, run by Bill Flitter. It’s been blogged by Steve Tennant and Eric Rice, which give useful summaries. It was a good session which points to the need for some commonly accepted blogger newbie resources. These are good - I always point to Mary Meeker’s review of blogging and rss (pdf).

Now, among the writeups, Steve Tennant’s post - notes taken in Word and posted in pdf - raises an interesting question. How have the output, and the tools we use to capture that output changed? What are the expectations of our audience?

I sympathize, and can say “I would like to be able to use the tools I prefer in the mode to which I’m accustomed”. For me, it’s not Word (but I do like their spellcheck and autocorrect). I find myself taking notes in Vim. The interesting thing though - the way in which I see my usage pattern changing - is how often I find I’d prefer to use something like a post slug, like my little WordPress posty program here. I’ve got my quicktags, which with usage get handier (though it is true some of the same commands result in same formatting in word et al.) I’m thinking of doing up a vim with .vimrc to enable some of this - but you know, I’d really like the same structure as a blog post. Too bad I find JavaScript inscrutable - I’d like to add some tweaks here. Embarrassingly, this is the one area of WordPress I have been able to do nothing with.

It’s kind of a cyclic argument, one of those tailchasers that drive me nuts. Part of what got this post delayed (but shamelessly backdated - I have a chronology to maintain here guys) was what turned out to be a futile search for this tech. I looked at Anconia’s RocketPost and Ecto (thanks to Niall for the reco), but neither really did what I wanted. Ever pragmatic, I found I achieved the best results by just saving off a html of the “post” screen. Change some of the links, open up a few tabs, and it seems I can type, then post when I am back online. Dirty, but so far effective. Much better than trying to install the LAMP stack on my overtaxed Windows laptop.