Online Grandma

Image via Wikipedia

I’ll see if this post will get to my blog. I’m using ScribeFire, which is a Firefox plugin for making blog entries. It has a lot of nice features, but seems a little short on documentation.

It mentioned on the homepage that you can drag and drop formatted text from the web. Nowhere (that I can see) where that is elaborated on. Guess I’ll just try it and see what happens:

Other Features

Additionally ScribeFire allows you to:

• Categorize and tag your blog posts
• Upload images
• Set timestamps
• Save works-in-progress as notes
• Post an entry as a draft
• Share your posts on social websites
• Upload files via FTP

Okay, I just dragged-and-dropped the above bulleted list. That could be useful at times.

I could save this as a draft or publish it. I could also save a “note”. I tried clicking the “Save Note” button. Don’t know if it did anything or not. My question at this point is, if you save a note where does it go? And, more important, how do you get it back?

Aha! I found the answer to that question. In the right section of the ScribeFire window, there are a row of tabs at the top. The second tab, “Entries”, will give you a second row of tabs, “Posts”, “Notes”, and “Pages”. These will show you lists of — you guessed it! — posts, notes, and pages.

That right-hand panel is also where you configure the connection to your blog (or blogs — you can have a number of them). On the first shot of setting up my WordPress blog, it returned an error that XML-RPC services were disabled on the blog. To fix that, you need to log in to the blog’s admin area. Click “settings”, then “writing”. About halfway down the page, find a checkbox labeled “XML-RPC”. That needs to be checked.

Now I’ll try publishing this. I’ll edit in a few more comments … assuming it works … later.

(Next day)

Yes, it published. Now I’m wondering what will happen if a re-open the post in ScribeFire (by finding it in the right panel under “Entries” –> “Posts”), add some more text to it, and publishing again. Now I see two options below the text entry area: “Publish as Edit” and “Publish to Online Grandma”. I suppose that pretty well answers that question … I’m publishing this as an edit.

Here’s my next experiment. What if I do some editing right on my blog? By working in the WordPress editing page, my cool Zemanta plugin (another Firefox addition that I talked about previously) gets activated. Using its suggestions I can easily choose links, tags, pictures, and related articles to beef up my post.

OK. Did that. Now re-opening ScribeFire to see what it thinks of this development.

Far out! That didn’t bother ScribeFire a bit! When I open the entry just like I did before, there it is — complete with all the new additions, links, pictures, related articles and all. To see the categories and tags I added, I have to look in the right pane under the “Categories” tab — and all are present and accounted for. Obviously, this is where I would enter them when doing that from ScribeFire.

This has the makings of a very nice system. Here’s one obstacle I ran into, though. Zemanta didn’t find a link for a fairly crucial term to this article — “ScribeFire”. It would have been pretty easy to just put it in there the old-fashioned way. But, since I’m playing with tools, I used another of my standbys — Linkify. (I’ve written about that in this blog as well.)

Linkify is a little script-thingy that you keep in the bookmark toolbar of your browser. So, it won’t work in ScribeFire; you need to go to the editing screen on your blog. From there, you have to get into the HTML view. Then select the words you want for your link, click on the “linkify” bookmarklet, and a sidebar with search results will open. Choose the result you want and click “create link”. (I’ll admit this is a bit of overkill if you already know the URL, but it’s useful if you don’t.)

There’s another aspect of ScribeFire that sounds very intriguing. They have recently added an ad serving program, which is in closed Beta at the moment. I put my name on the waiting list to give it a look-see. When I find out more, I’ll make a post on that. But, I must say, indications are favorable. They have information on their website.

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Image via WikipediaAll day I’ve been working on rearranging my various blogs and sites. I signed up for a second Reseller Hosting package, this one with ResellerZoom. (The first one is with HostGator.) The reason for this is the old “eggs in one basket” philosophy. Also, I now have a couple of pieces of software that need a cPanel on the hosting package to work.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been dabbling with internet stuff so that I’ve ended up with hosting here and hosting there, and there’s been no plan or system to it. I’m consolidating everything onto these two Reseller Packages in a nicely organized way. (That’s the plan anyway … )

However, it’s easier said than done. Today I’ve been pulling out my hair trying to move a WordPress blog — this one, as a matter of fact. (Here’s a little side note for anybody thinking of starting a blog … Pick out the host you really want before you start. It’s a royal pain to move it later.)

Well, enough of that. The real purpose of this post is to test a service called “Zemanta“. In order to see how it works, it’s necessary to enter a bit of text into your blog’s editor. When it has enough to figure out what you’re talking about it starts giving you suggestions.

There’s a sidebar to the right showing relevant pictures from Flickr and articles that it finds from … wherever (?) At the bottom, there are links and tags that I can apply with a click.

Cool! I just clicked on one of the more relevant pictures, and — just like that — there it is in my post!

Guess I’ll see what happens when I click on one of the articles. Here goes … Okay, it places the link in a “Related articles” box at the end of the post. For each article, there’s a little “visit” link so you can check them out before adding them. I suppose one ought to do that. I’ll stick another one in here so the first one won’t look so lonely.

Next, we’ll experiment a bit with the links it’s suggesting. It’s found ten things to make links of in this post so far. You can check the links it comes up with to see where they go, and use them or not. Seems that mostly they go to Wikipedia. For the sake of this experiment, I’ll choose the “Apply all” selection. It very helpfully provides us a definition of “philosophy” and information on the meaning and origin of the term “eggs in one basket”.

Well, you never know … People frequently don’t know what the heck I’m talking about.

To finish up this test, I’ll also apply all the tags suggested without changing them. This has been fun. Even marginally helpful. I’d recommend having a look at it.