Windows Live Writer

Ever since purchasing my iMac several months ago, I've been searching for decent OS X desktop blogging software.  After test driving several of the products on the market, including both MarsEdit and ecto, I have yet to find anything that I like as much as good old Windows Live Writer.  So, I'm going to keep using WLW.  I just got it running in "Unity" mode under VMware Fusion on my iMac.  So, now, it appears on my dock right next to all my other favorite programs.  Yeah!

Flock niggles

After a couple of full days of using Flock, I've come up with a couple of niggles:
  1. Flock seems to prefer it's formatting to the formatting on my blog.  I wish it didn't.  I don't want to have to use my control panel to "fix" every post I write.
  2. Flock seems to prefer Technorati tags to the tags built into my blog engine.  I like the idea.  I just wish it would use both.
On the plus side, the blog editor did correctly handle the Categories used by Graffiti.  I wasn't expecting it to.  But, as it stands, these issues will probably prevent me from using the Flock blog editor for any serious blogging.  But, the rest of the browser is pretty darn cool.  I especially like the "my world" view for the sheer volume of information it presents.

Flock you!

Flock is a very cool new browser based on the same Mozilla bits as the more familiar Firefox browser.  Why should you care?  Flock integrates the Web 2.0 experience of sites like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube directly into the browser in an incredibly intuitive way.  I've only been playing with Flock for about 30 minutes, but it has already earned a spot on my dock.  In fact, I'm writing this blog post using Flock's integrated blog post editor.  This after importing my feeds from NewsFire and scanning them in about 15 minutes - unheard of, for me.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
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GraffitiCMS

About once a year, or so, I redo the family web site.  It gives me a chance to pretend I still write web code.  And, it keeps me off of World of Warcraft, of which Jill is not so fond. Now that we're at home with the twins, I thought this would be a perfect time to update the family site.  But, frankly, I wasn't looking forward to it.  I'd been using Telligent's Community Server.  And, while it worked.  It sure seemed like overkill.  And, skinning the site wasn't exactly easy.  To get the look and feel I wanted, I was about to make the switch to Wordpress. So, I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled on Telligent's new GraffitiCMS - a product built for small sites with a focus on blogging.  And, now that the transformation is nearly complete, I can heartily recommend Graffiti.  It does everything I need out of a content management / blogging engine.  And, it's extremely simple to setup and use.  Graffiti's mix of ASP.NET, simplicity, and the very cool Chalk templating language kept me from having to learn everything from the ground up.  Kudos to the Graffiti team for an excellent product!