Oliver Siodmak’s Rants & Raves

Using a new WordPress plug-in from Jared Bangs and Dan Cameron, I am now able to more easily post to and manage my blog from my iPhone. Thanks guys!

Saving a life is not always an easy thing. It involves making a sacrifice, long term commitment and, at times, a change in your way of life. I have been fortunate in my life to have presented with the opportunity to rescue a dog and several cats. In each case, the introduction of a new pet has resulted in an over abundance of joy and love in our home.

While I know not everyone out there is in a situation where they can make the commitment to adopt a dog or cat from a shelter. I am hoping you can join Sharon (my wife) and I in supporting the ASPCA.

The ASPCA is a wonderful organization. They are an active member of the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC Pets. They actively survey the NYC Center for Animal Care and Control and rescue animals that will be euthanized if they are not adopted within their seven day holding period.

By clicking on the banner at the top of this page, you too can join Sharon and me and our efforts to make NYC a “No Kill Shelter City”. San Francisco is currently the first city in the United States to receive the status of a No Kill Shelter City by implementing programs to help eliminate the need to euthanize thousands of healthy dogs, cats and other domestic pets each year.

Together .. We can help NYC become a No Kill City too!

If you are like Sharon and me. You occasionally find yourself having a really, really long day. So long in fact you find it continuing straight through dinner and into the early evening.

On days like this I try to take little breaks so I don’t feel completely brain dead by the end of the day. Since I work from home, breaks are often instituted upon me by my almost 5 year-old son, Jake. These breaks are often a welcome distraction from the endless series of e-mails, instant messages and phone calls. During one such break today he even volunteered to go to Starbucks and get me a cup of coffee! What a joy.

In addition to the periodic family breaks I also make a point of making dinner a step above eating out of a little paper box. Tonight was a good example. Neither Sharon nor I had a chance to order, let alone make dinner. A quick scan of the refrigerator found the 3/4 remains of a Rib Eye steak (far to expensive to simply feed to the dog — sorry Chestnut), steamed veggies with two jumbo shrimp and a full box of brown rice.

Right about now you are saying to yourself .. “Oh my god, call the NYC Child Welfare Department, they are malnourishing their child!” Not to worry. Jake’s nanny does a great job making all of his meals during the work week. On a good night, there are left-overs for Sharon and I to feed off of. Tonight however, was not one of those nights.

Back to my point. After a quick spin in the microwave, I had all the food nicely warmed up. I simply called upon my childhood memories of Julia Childs and said to myself, “How would Julia present this meal?” Out came to nice china plates, a placemat and a drinking glass. A little thought an effort on food placement and you can hardly tell that we are settling for leftovers.

For more than a months now I have been trying to find the “right” offline blog editing tool. The problem is I work differently depending on where I am and what I am doing. Let me explain. Initially, I wanted a tool that allowed me to quickly create and post blog entries. Since I work on a Mac, the tool needed to integrate with iLife (specifically: iPhoto, iMovie and occasionally Garageband). Support for YouTube and Flickr would be a definite plus. After doing some initial research I stopped myself and decided to approach the problem they way I would for any client.

Once I put on my consulting hat and thought not so much the “what” but the “where” I realized that I do most of my blogging (more than 50% of the time) when I am on the road (e.g., airport, cab, train, etc.). It is not that I don’t have interesting things to write about when I am at home or in the office. It is that the time I am waiting in a queue allows me to start thinking through some of the ideas I have pushed to the back of my head during the normal work day. It appears I can be very productive when I am waiting in line to be strip-searched by airport security or preparing for my flight to take off before I am abused by a flight attendant for not stowing my electronic devices. The device that is usually most handy is my Blackberry and my iPhone. Both which have decent inputing capabilities. Hmmm .. now what?

Since I almost always have my trusty MacBook Pro with me I decided to take a step back and first try Ecto and MarsEdit. I chose these tools based on friends recommendation and comments from other bloggers. Both tools worked well. They both allowed me to easily create a posts off-line but I wasn’t always happy with the final post as it appeared online in my blog. Often the font was not what I specified in my CSS file, the page breaks didn’t appear in the right place or the image alignment was off. If I used the tool to go back and edit my post, the updates appeared as new posts vs updates. I consistently found myself editing the posts directly using Wordpress via a browser (Ugh!).

Now to be honest, I am not 100% sure if the the presentation/formating issues are due to the software, or some issue with WordPress itself. No judgements, No judgements! But that is really not my point. My point is that I was not able to use just one tool to post and manage my blog. Perhaps it is just not realistic to use just “one” tool.

Now I am sure some of you are saying, “hey doofus, you can submit e-mails to your blog and have them post automatically.” That’s true. Unfortunately, my hosting provider GoDaddy has some really great ISP security constraints that have, to date, prevented me from successfully activating the mail-to-blog functionality built into Wordpress. While I am satisfied with them as a hosting provider ($7.95/month with ridiculously large storage and bandwidth ain’t bad), I have been able find someone at GoDaddy who can help me work through the email agent issues. And believe me it is not due to a lack of trying.

So for now … the search will continue. I have just downloaded the latest versions of Ecto and MarsEdit and will put them through their paces. I am using MarsEdit to write this post so I’ll keep you informed on how it is working. When I am on the road, I simply type up my post as an email and send it to my personal email account where it sits until I have a change to post it to my blog.

If you have any ideas, thoughts or useful comments on the process or tools you use to manage your blog. I’d love to hear about them. Please post your comments below.

You just have to love the simplicity of badges and widgets.  Badges are simply code that allow you to incorporate functionality into your web site. Flickr, Facebook and even Twitter provide you with some simple code that when dropped into an HTML/PHP/ASP/.Net page on your site pull content from those sites into yours.

You can see an example of this in the sidebar of my site.  The second column now displays a Twitter badge that displays my last 5 Twitter postings (affectionally known as “tweets”).The code was provided by Twitter (http://twitter.com/badges).  You can select one of three styles of badges.  I am using the HTML version that immediately leverages the CSS file I use to control my site’s presentation. 

To learn more about Twitter check out this video.

To learn more about badges check out:

• Flicker Badges
• Twitter Badges
• Dilbert Widget

Enjoy.