Blogging Tools

I have been trying to find an excellent blogging tool for a while now. I have used many blogging engines over the years since I started a weblog back in 2003. I got into blogging back in September of 2003 for two reasons.

#1 – My relationship with my then current girlfriend was fading. We broke up in December 2003.
#2 – I saw that Google had purchased Blogger and all of it’s services went from being limited free to being totally free.

It was interesting back in those days. Blogger.com had I think 7 templates. None of them that great. It was mainly a way to talk about my hobby at the the time. Satellite Radio. In fact the first domain I purchased for myself was XMDude.com. Now it just redirects back to TristanPipo.com. At that point I felt like I was losing faith in the XM Satellite radio community. When the XM Community fan site that I ran clubXM.com (Now Defunct) got ignored and XMFan.com came to be. So I then migrated to SiriusDude.com. Then I got tired of the entire Satellite Radio game when I got an iPod. TristanPipo.com was then born. But I have moved between a few webhosts and blogging engines.

Currently I am hosting this site using the WordPress blogging engine. I feel that it’s the best. I have been told I should be using Drupal and I have also been looking at moving to a SquareSpace hosting solution. But I kinda like GoDaddy but some of the tweaks I had to implement to get the site to load properly I am not a huge fan of.

But I should really get back on point. I am really trying to make an active effort to get back into blogging. But I find myself working on a computer all day. I get home and the last thing I want to do is touch a computer. I am currently sitting at my desk with 3 Mac Laptops.

Now most people would just login to WordPress and post via that method but the interface seems to have gotten cluttered over the years. I like the features that it offers. But most of the time I just want to write some text. But I also find that things that are bothering me or I want to discuss should be private. I would love to post like I used to. I felt that no feelings happened to be involved. But if I post something that bothers someone I feel like I am going to get put in a place I don’t want to be. I prefer to pick and choose my battles. Getting in trouble over a blog post hardly seems worth it to me. If you want to view my less censored version of things you can follow me on Twitter. twitter.com/tristanpipo.

Ugh I really want to talk about blogging tools.

So I use a Mac for most of my blogging interactions. I have a few tools MarsEdit is one of my currently favorite tools. It’s nice when I don’t want to launch a web browser and just write a blog post with media or fancy formatting. It’s also nice to use when you manage blog posts on multiple blogs.

Most of the time I find myself just using Textmate because it’s a very powerful text editor. I can just open it up and hit new blog posts and then publish in about 2 seconds. I am writing this blog post with Textmate as we speak.

Textmate Interface

Otherwise I just use the post editor built into wordpress. Does anyone have a particular blogging tool or platform that they like to use? I like to host it on a server that I full control over just because of the nerd in me. But I find myself not wanting to deal with spending so much time managing that. But anyways as we approach the holidays. I hope everyone has a good one. This is going to be my first year cooking a Turkey. I am going to deep fry one. It’s been a bit of a debate in my family. But I am excited to try and hopefully nobody dies or gets burnt.

Tristan Out….

Blogging From a Coffee Shop

So I thought today I would try a new experience. I am currently sitting in a coffee shop. I never understood why people go to coffee shops to sit down and use their laptops. Most of the time I thought people just wanted to do anti social activities in a social place. It doesn’t seem like sitting here people are just going to come up to you because you are on a laptop. It seems like it would make people stay away from you. So far I have yet to have any social interaction with anyone.

I wouldn’t describe it as being a cool experience. So I am just going to assume that people that do this are cheap. They don’t want to fork out for their own internet access. The WiFi at this coffee shop sucks to begin with. 768Kbps DSL I decided to bust out my MiFi and use the 3G access on that. Much faster oddly enough at least I can stream a Netflix movie if I decide to. But people wanting to be around people and free internet is what I am going to assume is the reasoning for people in coffee shops on their laptops.

Hope everyone gets a chance to enjoy the remaining hours of their weekend. Tristan is out.