Blogging Tools for Programmers

What kind of tools do you use for blogging? I am writing this, and most of my posts, in Blogger's web interface. I have tried a few other tools, but none of them are very good. There are some basic things that I want out of a blogging tool:

0.) Obviously it has to work with Blogger.
1.) Rich formatting. If nothing else I need to be able to easily create links. Full WYSIWYG editing would be great though. Don't make me do manual HTML formatting, but please don't prevent me either.
2.) Image hosting integration. I would like to be able to take either images on my local computer or off the web to include in the blog.
3.) Blogger tags/labels. I have a small blog, with about 100-150 unique viewers daily (as measure by MyBlogLog, which seems reliable.) There may be more folks who use blog reading tools, too, who knows. A decent number of the views come from people doing Google searches for "blah". These searches often lead to blog posts that I have tagged as "blah." No tagging means less visibility, so forget that.
4.) Offline mode would be nice. Really the first three thing are handled pretty well by Blogger's native web interface. But it would be nice to able to compose a post while offline.
5.) OSX. I blog on my MacBook almost exclusively and I do not want to boot Parallels just to blog. Integration with OSX spellchecker is pretty much implied too.

Does that seem like so much? I don't think so, but yet I have not found an acceptable solution for this. Seems like most desktop apps are designed for WordPress, TypePad, and Movable Type. I have tried things that are supposed to be great, like Mars Edit, and was underwhelmed. So even though nothing quite satisfies the above simple requirements, what I would really like is something that also supported:

6.) Code. I like to include code in my posts. It would be great to have something that made it easy for me to copy-n-paste code. It should escape special characters for me (like greater than and less than signs), provide code highlighting based on the language, and provide scrolling. Right now I use a PHP highlighter from Gilly. I had to hack in the CSS for this in one of my sidebar widgets. It works ok, but is a bit manual and the code often overflows.

Is there a tool like this out theere and I just don't know it? Is there a tool out there that does all of this but only with one of the other blogging platforms? If that were true, I would have to figure out how much pain would be involved with migrating... Maybe I should just build this using AIR?

Blogging about Books

I mentioned some new books that I am reading. The publisher of those books gave me the opportunity to blog about them while I read them. I thought that would be fun, and would give me extra motivation to read the books thoroughly. I am blogging about them directly on their site InformIT. Here is the RSS feed of my blog over there and here is the first post. It is on the Core Python book that I am reading.

Bad Writing

I like reading Marc Andreessen's blog. He has good insight. Today I saw the news about Google's Open Social initiative. I noticed that Ning was a participant, so I figured Marc would have something interesting to say about it. Reading his entry reminded me of many other entries by him and how incredibly annoying his writing style is. Let me give some qualification to this statement.

My 10th grade English teacher, Dr. Deluzain, was really tough. He made all of his students write a lot, and he absolutely tore up everything you wrote. I give him tons of credit for making me into a decent writer. In college, the biggest advantage I had over other Caltech students was not my mathematical abilities, it was my writing skill. Math bailed me out in many situations, and led to my only A+ (in quantum chemistry if you can believe that,) but I was always the best writer in every "soft" (literature, history, political science, etc.) class I took. Thanks Dr. D.

One of the lessons I learned from Dr. Deluzain was that you should never use styling in writing. This was 1991, so word processing had become popular. Of course people wanted to use bold and italics, or large fonts, to drive home points. Dr. D. taught me this was obnoxious and unnecessary. It showed poor skill. If you had to resort to such tactics to emphasize your point, then obviously you were doing so to make up for a lack of writing skill.

Fast forward back to the pmarca blog. Andreessen has to be the worst person I've ever seen at using italics and bold all over the place. Normally I just ignore it. College taught me that most technical people never need to hone their writing skills, so why should Andreessen be any different. The first full paragraph (most of his first few paragraphs are actually just sentences, but I digress) has 102 words in. Of those, 27 words are either bold or italics. Of the other 75 words, 21 are in quotations, which is a similar sign of poor writing (one I'm guilty of too, though it's not quite as bad.) It just makes my head hurt. I hate being a writing snob, but I needed to vent and that's part of what my blog is for.

I dislike writers who can only bring up negatives and never offer solutions to problems. So I decided to re-write his paragraph. I tried to keep his words as much as possible.

"Technically, Open Social is implemented as what I call a plugin API, or a Level 2 platform. In other words, it's not a web services API -- rather, it's a way for external applications to plug into a host environment (container). The external app literally shows up insides the pages of the container, and can make Javascript calls to retrieve information from the container and perform functions within the container. For example you can make a Javascript call to get a list of all of the user's friends, or to inject an event into the user's activity feed."

Isn't actually a lot less work to write it like this? Or has the web redefined good writing style? Maybe my way is antiquated and Marc's is exemplary...

Job Search 2.0

I read the above blog on how web 2.0 has changed job searching. As somebody who has recently changed jobs, this made for an interesting read. The points from the blog that I found personally relevant were:

Blogs -- Job posts tied to blogs is a great idea. My job was posted on Joel on Software. My company is about to post an opening we have on there. Turns out our CTO reads Joel on Software. I read Joel on Software. Now we work together. The problem with job posting on blogs is fragmentation. I read a lot of blogs. Not all of them have job boards, but several do. It would be pretty expensive and time consuming to post jobs on all of those blogs' job boards.

RSS -- The Joel on Software jobs board has an RSS feed. I could save a search on there and subscribe to its RSS feed. That was how I saw my job. I read it in Google Reader, clicked on it to Joel on Software, etc. There is definitely no downside to this. Every job site should offer RSS feeds for any job search you can make on their site.

Ecto-Mac

As promised, I'm giving Ecto a try on the Mac. It sure looks a lot different. The Windows look-and-feel was very Office-ish. The Mac version looks like ... Mac-like, but not really like any other Mac app. Setup was also challenging again. On the Windows version, I needed the unique GData URL to my blog (unique because it includes Blogger's internal ID for the my blog.) For the Mac version, I just needed the generic URL used to retrieve blog metadata for an authenticated user. It still required double authentication, just as the Windows version did. The insert iPhoto pic didn't work any better than the insert Flickr photo did on Windows. I'm clearly missing something. I'll use it a few times and see if it grows on me. The tagging is probably critical...

Update: The labels worked a little better. I got the little Technorati tags bit, just as Flock likes to put them. No Blogger labels, though, so this will probably not be a product I purchase.

Technorati Tags: ecto

Ecto

I was reading this article on great Mac products and the very first one mentioned is a blog editor called Ecto. I was using my work laptop (Windows) when I read it, but noticed there was a Windows version. I decided to give it a try.

It uses the .NET framework, so there is a noticeable lag when it starts up. Maybe that will go away on Vista. Setting up my Blogger account required me to manually fetch the ID of blog and enter my credentials twice. The latter is just annoying, the former is something that I can't imagine most people doing.

The interface is pretty nice. It loaded all my old posts rapidly and allowed me to edit them easily. It also has nice support for Blogger's tagging system, err labels. It has nice integration with Flickr, allowing me to view my photostream from inside Ecto though I could only seem to insert a picture as a link, not an actual image.

All in all a promising product. I'll try it a few more times. I think the Mac is its "native" environment, so it might be better on there. Don't know if it's worth $$, but it's really pretty cheap ($18.)

Update: Turns out Ecto screws up Blogger's tagging/labels. That's something that Flock doesn't handle well either. That's too bad. Some MyBlogLog analysis shows that I get a lot of traffic via Google search for "foo" -> "foo" label on my blog. Definitely no $18 for the Windows version in that case. I'll try the Mac version tonight.

Link Blog

I was playing around with some of the new Blogger features. I was pleased to see you could add different widgets to your blog. I was very interested in looking at the markup code they are using to capture this in your blog's template. I added a couple of widgets to my blog. Most interesting is probably the link blog. I added this by adding a "feed widget" to my blog, and giving it the RSS URL of my link blog from Google Reader. Now whenever I read an interesting article, I just hit "shift-S" and it shows up on my blog.