Blogging from ipod touch

This is going to be a very short entry. For I’m typing this up on my iPod touch tapping my fingers on the touch screen. Although the screen is very responsive and the predictive input seem to improve as I type along, it’s still a pain to tap fingers for long. Anyway, I found this cool wordpress app for free so thought I should give it a try, and I’m impressed at how easy it was to set up and start blogging. Now I’ll see if I can connect my Bluetooth keyboard with this thing and type fast! But this is cool in itself !!!

iprocrastinate.co.uk

…is the new address for random jottings…, with a new (and probably more apt) tagline “procrastination with purpose” . I always thought it was pretty lame to have a personal blog on .org domain, and mahesh.poudyal.org did sound very lame to begin with, but somehow I stuck with it for a good few years, probably because it became more familiar and I became more comfortable with it over time. Anyway, I had this new domain for almost a year now – I got it as soon as I saw procrastination.com – on one of those days when I was avoiding doing any work by doing everything else but THE WORK! I have been like that these past few days – working for an hour and avoiding the same for a couple of hours so its like walking two steps forward and a step back. Nevertheless, two hours of avoidance for one hour of work has produced something – the migration of rj… to this new address, and more importantly a whole facelift for poudyal blog, also on a new address – pixels.iprocrastinate.co.uk. I decided to have my photoblog on Pixelpost this time as opposed to my usual favourite WordPress, mainly because it is purpose built for photoblogs, and more importantly it lets me post a picture directly from Adobe Lightroom without having to log on through the browser and so on.

For now I’ll leave all the old contents on rj… here and pb over at its old address. I have already moved every single post with all the comments intact from old rj… site to its new address, however, it’s a bit complicated moving posts from old photoblog to the new one, mainly because of the different platform it uses. Also I feel I should start afresh with my photography, as I’m been a bit of a slacker lately when it comes to photography, and this blank canvas of a blog might inspire me to take and post new and better pictures, fingers crossed. So there it is – the announcement of changing addresses, online.

So visit http://iprocrastinate.co.uk/ for random jottings…, and http://pixels.iprocrastinate.co.uk/ for poudyal blog. Please also update the address for the RSS feeds (if you subscribe to either) to these new addresses. Thanks.

Now on a different note, I hadn’t even heard of this Benjamin Button movie until the nominations for the Oscars were announced earlier today! So I decided to watch it to find out why it deserved 13 nominations. I wasn’t disappointed. Although a bit weird to begin with, the movie is totally gripping – after a bit, everything starts to feel normal, no weirdness of people “growing” young (did I just give out the spoiler!?!) and all that. It’s a beautifully made film and very original too. Deserves every accolade imo. Watch it!

ScribeFire

I’m always looking for applications that allows me to post to my blog easily, even though I am pretty lazy in updating my blogs these days. On my Mac, I use ecto to post new entries almost always. However there are times when I would like to stay on my browser (Firefox) while I publish a quick post. I have tried using the Flock browser just for that purpose, but I am a Firefox person and one thing that is always running on my machine is Firefox, even when Skype (the other application which is mostly on) is not on! This is where ScribeFire comes in. It’s a small Firefox add-on that does BIG things. It lets you post to your blogs (all major blogging platforms supported!) directly from the Firefox (tab or split window) without having to log-on to your blogging platform through the web interface! It is small, fast and gives you enough options.

One option that I would really like on ScribeFire is to be able to add WordPress specific tags and not just the Technorati tags as it currently lets you insert. Other than that ScribeFire is almost perfect! And of course I am posting this from Firefox using ScribeFire!

Really SimpleScripts…

Upgrading WordPress used to be such a pain (although WP website would claim otherwise with their “5-minute install/upgrade” instructions) – even if it involved fairly simple tasks like downloading, uploading, deleting or overwriting files and folders using ftp! Now thanks to SimpleScripts, even that is not necessary. All I need to do is deactivate all the plugins (one click) and use SimpleScripts to upgrade my WP install (another click, and a tick to agree to its disclaimer!) – all automated and from the server. No need to download, upload, zip, unzip, delete, overwrite, or anything like that…what a relief! Cheers SimpleScripts!

Upgraded to WP 2.5

I have been trying WP 2.5 RCs over the few days on my test blog (where I tweak themes and so on), and have been really impressed with the features. Just saw the full release, and without waiting to even test it on my “test” blog, I upgraded rj… And I must say it went without a glitch. I was worried, especially as I wasn’t sure if my modified K2 RC3 theme would work, as well as the old plugins. But no problem at all. In fact all of my outdated plugins, I was able to upgrade from the Dashboard with a SINGLE CLICK…Great!!!

You can find the details of all the new features HERE, but just to name a few here – the dashboard is clean and very user friendly, you can upload multiple images and insert them as a gallery on the post, one click plugins upgrade from within the dashboard (I love this feature!), allows you to add audio, video etc with few clicks etc…Although I’m an ecto user when posting entries from my own computer, these new features are definitely attractive enough for me to post from within the WordPress system once in a while, especially when I want to post multiple images and gallery. By the way, I’m writing this from within the WP system

Well done WP Developers!