Blogging on the Mac

Blogging on the Mac can be as simple or as complex as you choose it to be. Blogging can be a lot of fun and a truly rewarding experience. The first thing you have to decide is what you want to blog about. Pick something that is interesting to you and that you can write about on a regular basis. It took me some time to learn this important tidbit. Regular blogging is very important to getting repeat visitors to your site. My first six months of blogging I could have lunch with all of my readers because I wasn’t writing on a regular basis. As soon as I set a deadline for myself and started sticking to it I saw an immediate increase in traffic.
I started off by purchasing a domain name through godaddy.com. www.macguy.info serves as my home page and blog.macguy.info is redirected to paulmacguyscott.blogspot.com where my blog is hosted. Next step was to signup for blogger using my gmail account. Once I had the blog site setup and configured the way I wanted it to look I setup blog.macguy.info to redirect to my blog page.
Next to see what kind of traffic I am getting I went to Analytics.google.com and setup an analytics account so I can see how many hits a day I am getting, how my visitors are finding me and what country they are from. This is just of interest to me and it is only very general information but it gives me an idea of who comes to my site and sometimes what pages they are visiting.
Really the best source of feedback is comments on the blog itself, emails, or tweets I get from my readers. Some of them even give me ideas for future posts. As a part of regular posting process I started planning what topics I am going to write on ahead of time. Currently I build my schedule about two months out. I plan topics around certain dates that might be relevant. A review of study software in August right before students go back to school, or a look back on technology when a company hits a mile stone anniversary. Of course sometimes I shuffle things around if a big story breaks or an important issue comes up that needs to be covered.
Planning these ahead of time allows me to start researching and writing ahead of time as well. I can start putting my notes together or interesting bits I think of I want to write in file so i can keep track of it when I am ready to write it. I am also trying to write several articles a week and hold them until it is time to publish so taking a vacation or being busy with my day job doesn’t throw me off my scheduled posts.
Another option when news breaks is to just add an extra story for the week to my blog. Since this is all digital I don’t have to worry about a real deadline or how much space I take up. I can always add a bonus story if I like or just move the schedule around. Currently I plan about two months in advance what I plan to write so currently I just move stories around, eventually I might add extra stories to the blog as I have more time to write.
After the first few months of writing my blog in the web based editor on blogger I decided I wanted a better way to post. So I started looking at different programs that might help me focus on my writing and post my stories. I settled on MacJournal from http://marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=85. It is a nice software priced at $39.95 and versatile. In addition to being linkable to several blogging platforms like Blogger, Word Press, Type Pad, and Live Journal you can create private encrypted journals to share your personal thoughts and writings for just yourself or perhaps a memoir for the future.
MacJournal lets me keep a local copy of all of my blog entries so I have a copy on blogger and a copy on my laptop that is also backed up to Time Machine and Mobile Me. For those keeping score that is four copies of my writing in three different locations on two different kinds of media. In a future post I will do a piece on backing up in depth.
MacJournal also allows you to add your tags and set publishing dates right in the Inspector. This saves time when uploading your blog post. You configure your site settings under share and when it comes time to post your blog you just click share, Send To “Name of your blog here” and it uploads and shows you the page in Safari once it is loaded. The only weak point I have seen with MacJournal so far has been it can’t upload images to Blogger. Any images I add to my blog I have to do on the web after I have uploaded the story. I hope this is something that can be fixed in a future revision. Once I have uploaded the images I can re download the story into blogger and update my local copy and it does download the images just fine although it doesn’t hold the formatting as it is displayed on the web.
If I am traveling and have a need to post in my blog I use BlogPress on my iPad and iPhone. http://blogpress.coollittlethings.com/ This is a great piece of software that allows me to blog while away form home. In April i wrote a story reviewing the iPad while on a cross country flight. Since the plane had WiFi I was able to write my story and post it right from plane. Writing a 2,000 word review of the iPad on the iPad was a good experience and one that showed me short of software development I didn’t really need to carry my laptop with me anymore if I was only going a few days. Now with Remote Access software I hardly ever have to carry my laptop anymore unless I just want to for some reason or I need to sync my iPad with my computer. BlogPress syncs right up with blogger and was the first iPad Blogging tool available on the app store. I just open it up and start typing. I even can add images right to blogger from the iPad. At the time there was on editing software for photos on the iPad so I wasn’t able to rotate the image the way I wanted the screen shot to look but it worked in a pinch.
If I don’t have my iPad with me but I am carrying my iPhone BlogPress runs on the iPhone as well. Now I can take pictures and write a story right in the field. With a Bluetooth keyboard it is easy to write from the iPhone. So now I can take my writing with me wherever I go. BlogPress will even let you save movies to your YouTube Account and link them to your blog. So no we can do pictures, movies, and text all live from wherever we are.
I blog because I like to write and I like to share information with people. I get a great deal of satisfaction knowing people are reading what I write and getting something out of it. For that I want to thank each and every one of you for visiting my blog and enjoying and learning from what I have written. Please keep the comments, tweets, emails, and Facebook posts coming. I couldn’t do what I do without you all.

Safari 5

Today we will take a look at the new Safari 5 Web Browser from Apple. It was released on June 7th just hours after the Mac World Developers Conference Keynote had wrapped up. The Safari 5 update is also included in the OS X 10.6.4 update that was released on June 15th.
Safari 5 is not a significant change from Safari 4 only adding a few new features. The first big feature is Safari Reader which allows you to click the Reader button in the address bar to strip out ads and put articles that are spanned across multiple pages on a single page. This is a great feature for users to make large articles more easily readable although I imagine advertisers won’t care for it too much.
Safari 5 has added additional support for HTML5 making it the most HTML5 compliant browser and the only browser that is fully ACID3 compliant. The new Nitro JavaScript Engine makes Safari faster than the previous version. Safari and Google Chrome are close to one another in performance followed by Firefox and of course the slowest of main stream web browsers is Internet Explorer.
Safari has added Bing to the list of browsers you can select for your default search in the toolbar. Smarter searching in the address bar was added so if you type any word that appears in an address or in the title of the site that is in your history or bookmarks it is displayed in a drop down for you to select. Safari has also added a new feature under tabs that allows you to decide if you want to open pages in tabs Always, Automatically or Never. Opening in a tab always or never is pretty self explanatory the Automatically however was a little less clear. According to the Safari Help files the Automatic setting will open all windows in a new tab unless that windows is formatted to open in a separate window.
The biggest feature will take sometime for us to start seeing in the Safari 5. Safari 5 now includes Extensions. The Extensions are signed and Sandboxed to protect your computer data from access and the signatures assure you that the extension came from a specific developer. Apple plans to open a gallery later this summer with developers extensions available for people to customize their browsers.
Currently the functionality is a bit hidden, first you must click Safari, Preferences, Advanced, and check the Show Develop menu in menu bar. Once you have done that click Develop in the menu bar and choose Enable Extensions. Once you have done that the Extensions button appears in the Preferences Pane.
Signing up to be part of the Safari Extension Developers program is free and each developer gets a digital certificate so we can be sure the code hasn’t been tampered with and comes from the developer who signed the code.
A couple other cool new features includes right clicking on the title bar text will give you a look back at the pages you visited in that particular tab and allow you to select one of the previous pages to jump back to it. The other improved feature of Safari is the improved web inspector that now includes timelines. This shows someone who is testing a web page or a developer who is writing a web page when HTML or Java Script is being rendered and how long it takes in a graphical format so you can really see what your pages are doing and what order they are rendering in.
The new version of Webkit 2 hasn’t been included in Safari yet as apparently they do not feel it is ready for prime time yet. It should be coming in the future providing even faster rendering a splitting the webkit process from the web processes to allow faster and more secure execution of code. This is what allows Google Chrome to give each tab its own process and one tab crashing doesn’t impact any of the others.
Overall the new browser is fast, stable and seems to do a good job rendering content. I can’t wait to see what developers come up with in the way of extensions to enhance the Safari browsing experience.