I have switched from using the on-line Wordpress editor to using an offline one on my Powerbook called MarsEdit. My main reason to switch is that I can work on blog posts while disconnected (but also the built in spell checker. I’m sure all my readers will appreciate that!). But the problem is two fold: Wordpress doesn’t support tagging without a plugin (I use Jerome’s Keywords) and Jerome’s Keywords isn’t supported through the XML-RPC interface that MarsEdit uses to talk to Wordpress (my opinion: small design problem on Wordpress’ part to not allow pluings to do XML-RPC stuff).

But I stumbled upon How to make ecto work with Jerome’s Keywords, which also will work for MarsEdit (and probably any other tool that uses XML-RPC to talk to WordPress).

First, make the two modifications to the Wordpress PHP code as mention in the ecto article.  This will allow you to set the keywords from MarsEdit.  But I went one better and allows MarsEdit to read what the tags are as well.  Make this modification to the same xmlrpc.php file:

In the mw_getPost function, look for the line that is creating the respone ($resp = array…).  Add the following line to the end of the array creation:

‘mt_keywords’ => get_post_meta($postdata['ID'], ‘keywords’, true)

And then you can fully use the keywords in MarsEdit.

Oh, and I also had to tell MarsEdit that I am using Wordpress so it could turn on the Keywords feature for me and I was good to go.

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So you may have noticed that things look a little different here at One Hoopy Frood today. That would be because I have switched over to my newly re-designed blog. I’ve had the design done for about a week, and wanted to spend a little more time playing with it and tweaking it, but some events pushed me to unveil it even earlier (mainly some problems with some recent changes with blogger.com’s software).

In addition to the new look and feel, I’ve also switched to WordPress as my blogging software from Blogger.com. I still think Blogger.com is a great service (my Other Blog is still using blogger), but as I had mentioned before, it lacked some features that I wanted to use. Basically, I outgrew it.

So let me give you a tour of my new humble abode on the web, and also talk about some of my expansion plans! I decided to go with a pretty traditional blog layout, with a blog header image across the top, the content on the left, and a sidebar along the right. The picture in the blog header is from the balcony in the South of France where Margaret and I stayed last year (did you catch the HHGTTG reference in there?).

The biggest change in the new layout is all the cool new features available in the sidebar. Starting at the top we have a list of Recent Updates that I have made to the blog. Currently it is set to 3, I may make it more it the future. Below that we have some links, currently only a link to my Wife’s blog. Under Tags we have a “Tag Cosmos”. Instead of having every post put into a category, I tag each post with some keywords to describe it. I have a tool that puts together a “Tag Cosmos”, where the size/intensity of the text of the tag indicates how often I’ve blogged about in. You can click on those tags to see all the blog posts about that topic.

Below that under the heading of Archives is a calendar where you can navigate all my back posts to see what else I’ve written about. Following is a Yet To Be Utilized “Pages” heading, where I will have a list of the static pages (ie. non blog posts) available. And finally a Search box where you can search this blog.

And I have more changes in store in the future. I want each post to be able to lists which tags are associated with it. In addition, I want to more fully utilize the trackback feature to allow me to track and publish who has linked to posts of mine. I also fully expect to constantly be making tweaks to the blog to make it easier to use and better.

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So I guess I’ve been doing this blogging thing for about 6 months now and I feel it is time for a little bit of a change. The first (and most noticeable) change I will be making is to the site layout. The look of this site is just a (slightly) customized version of one of the default blogger templates. As a result, it is pretty simple, but also very generic. Contrast the feel of this site to say, Margaret’s Blog where both Margaret and I worked hard to create a specific feel that Margaret came up with.

In short, I want my blog to look as nice as Margaret’s! So I’m going to spend some time thinking about what I want my blog to contain, how people are going to navigate it, and generally how I want the blog to look. Then I will work with Margaret to make things look nice by picking nice colors, using nice logos, and choosing nice fonts. I can’t do that stuff by myself, so I’m hoping that she will help.

I’ve also been thinking about moving to a new piece of blogging software. So the service offered (for free!) by Blogger.com are great, but there are a few things it is lacking that other blogging software provides. Things like sending and receiving trackbacks, automatic ping sending to services you configure, and also technorati.com tag handling. Now most of these feature I’ve been able to hack into blogger, but the trackback stuff was more than I wanted to mess around with.

So I looked at two of the most popular packages, Wordpress and Moveable Type. I’ve got debug installations of both of these packages going and played around with them for a bit to see which I liked better. As for general feature sets, they are pretty much exact matches. Anything one comes up with, the other adds as well. Price-wise, both are the same cost for my personal use (Wordpress is always free, MT is free for a single, personal blog and costs for more). Performance-wise, MT should beat out Wordpress (I haven’t done any formal testing) since MT creates static pages that you can serve, while Wordpress runs php on every page load. As for install difficulty, since I use Debian, it was a piece of cake to install Wordpress (apt-get install wordpress). MT had a few more steps, and most of it was manual. Right now I’m leaning towards wordpress.

So all this excitement should be happening over the next couple weeks. Stay tuned for more details!

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