The ever expanding blog

Okay, so I may not be posting regularly on my blogs but I am having a lot of fun adding bells and whistles to them. I’ve also added several new blogs that will eventually serve to handle different types of content. During the past few days, I’ve added a Book Review Blog and a Moblog (a blog that accepts media from mobile devices such as cell phones). At the moment, there do not appear to be any good plug-ins for e-mailing photos taken from cell phones, so I’m using a free service, called Flicker, to accept the photos first. Unfortunately, I’ve got to manually send the photos to my blog so that process really isn’t “instant.” I’ve been using a plug-in for another experiment using WordPress and that one does work. The only problem is that I can’t add comments to individual pictures (ugh!) so that limits usefulness of what I would like to do. Hopefully, someone will come up with a good plug-in for Movable Type (which I prefer over WordPress). Keeping my fingers crossed.

I’ve also just created a blog to contain Podcasts (which I’ve also been fooling around with) but that isn’t functional yet. Stay tuned for more fun Cool

Success, at last

Well, today has been very productive with the creation of blog-stuff. I was finally able to successfully install several plug-ins after spending many hours dealing with one disaster after another.

In addition, I found another freeware FTP client because the one I’ve been using for many years is simply inadequate. The new one works like a charm. At this point, I’m still exploring blog-land (the “blogosphere”) for other useful plug-ins before I write much more. Due to the horrendous problems with installation issues, I ended up having to completely reinstall MovableType, along with all of the plug-ins, several times before obtaining real success – that also explains why the posts below this one appear to have been all written over the past day when, in fact, they were written during the past week. I tried changing their dates in MovableType but that was not effective.

Overall, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this. Too cool.  Finally, I found a plug-in that permits the use of stupid smiley faces  and also allows WYSIWYG entries. In addition, it’s now possible to use a spell-checker with blog entries using another freeware program, ieSpell, that installs an app on your local machine. While it would be nice if this were a server-side feature, beggars can’t be choosers so it’ll do.

So much fun – NOT!

Well, this blog is working but I’m as frustrated as can be with the lack of documentation on how to get things working. Overall, I think that MovableType is a great, well-designed program but the lack of documentation will be the death of it if something doesn’t happen. Many of the most elemental items are left unexplained and sometimes result in hours of research and just plain experimentation. This scenario must be repeated by thousands of others as they try to establish a blog. The disturbing thing is that all of this wasted time could be prevented with simple documentation that has also been proofread for errors (gosh, what a concept). Just as frustrating is that I keep finding many others in search of the same answers but, like me, can’t find them.

At the moment, one of my most pressing problems is to how to alter the templates in order to add features from various plugins. Again, even one simple example would go a long way in helping out but such examples are not to be found (at least I haven’t found any yet after searching for many, many hours). I’ll keep trying though.