Franz Kelsch on Tech » Blogging

Posting from an iPhone

Franz — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 01:35:28 +0000

So cool! There is a new Word press app for the iPhone that allows me to write or edit a posting to a WordPress blog. I am using it for this entry.

Too bad it does not yet support images from the iPhone camera

ScribeFire Blog Software

Franz — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:38:04 +0000

I have mostly relied on the tools offered in WordPress to create and edit my blog postings but I have always wanted more. Since I have Adobe Creative Suite 3, I also have a copy of Adobe Contribute, which allows you to do direct editing of websites and blogs. Although this software has some nice features, such as the ability to insert tables, I have found using it to be rather annoying. If I try to edit an existing post, all the paragraphs are run together. It just seems to do havoc to the html code in the existing post.

I did stumble upon a neat plugin for FireFox, called ScribeFox. By clicking on the icon in the tool bar, I get a split screen, with the upper part of the FireFox window showing the blog and the lower one where I can create or edit a post. See below for what the input screen looks like. I did find there were no easy tools for setting the image attributes, such as the size. This software may not have all the bells and wistles but it is an elegant and straightforward approach to creating and editing blog entires. Also when I go back and use the built in tools in WordPress, I don’t get a scrambled mess like I do with Adobe Contribute.

Printing a Blog

Franz — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:28:13 +0000

I in the processing of creating several blog entries at our family blog for our recent vacation to Europe. We went on a cruise with some friends and they wanted to know how to get a copy of the entry. I had not thought about that before being a peson who has evolved to hardly ever printing anything and doing most things online. A little research showed a great WordPress plugin called “wp-print” that did the trick. You can add a link at the bottom of the entry that the viewer can click on get a print friendly view of the blog. This is much better than just using the browser to print since you would lose any styling from the CSS.

I doubt I will actually print things to paper, but I did experiment and used this method to create a PDF. That is a great way to archive your blog entry. Things online tend to disapear with time. Who will keep up some blogs year from now. If you are blogging as way to keep a history, this might be a good way. Here is an example of a PDF I created for our visit to Florence. I trimmed many of the pages from the PDF to reduce the file size since this is only for illustration purposes since the full 13 pages, with photos, produced a 7.5 mb PDF file. Florence and Pisa Blog PDF

Want to try it out, click the link below for this blog entry.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.