Yesterday’s post and this entry appear thanks to an interesting little piece of software called BlogDesk, which may provide a convenient enough posting interface that I’ll have an easier time updating this here journal.
Maybe.
The product, while generally nifty, sports a few interesting quirks. For instance, if (like me) you tend to insert HTML as you go, you’re going to be unpleasantly surprised by your post. BlogDesk tends to turn angle brackets into, well, angle brackets. You have to toggle over to “source” view to do anything meaningful in that regard, or use the “Insert HTML” command.
On the upside, it uses the <em> tag for italics and <strong> for bold face, thus supporting the recommended deprecation of <i> and <b>. (The basic idea is that you can and should decree via stylesheet what emphasized and/or strong text should look like instead of being restricted to simply italics and bold face. Never mind that almost nobody does this; it’s the principle of the thing, don’t you see?)
(Anyway. Ahem. Moving right along…)
BlogDesk is worth trying out, especially if you find yourself stuck sometimes feeling like you ought to post something but don’t feel like going to the trouble of firing up the browser and signing into your site’s administrative interface. It’ll post to WordPress and MovableType (among others), and will import your categories as well as allow you to set comment and trackback enabling on a post. I recommend giving it a whirl.
