Over the weekend I spent probably too much time tweaking the appearance of my new blog, scribkin. I got a select list of WordPress plugins installed and tweaked, got my Google ads set up the way I want them, etc. Actually, I could just do this for days -- partially because time just flies past when I am doing this work, and also, I think I am a little scared of actually working on the content part.

Fast forward to today. I decide, ok, I need to focus on content. But I wasn't happy with the built-in WordPress editor, for a couple of niggling reasons. First, it was too slow. I am fairly certain this has more to do with my site's hosting provider than it does with the blog though -- for some reason the server I am on always has a high load and when I click save sometimes it takes up to a minute for the page to re-load. Pretty annoying!

Second, when I want to center some images in a post, if I use the "centered text" icon in the rich text mode, it uses a paragraph tag with the align flag set to center. For some reason, my blog theme doesn't honor this and it doesn't center. A div align works great though. So I go into HTML edit mode and make the change and save it. Works great until I want to edit the post again later, and then WordPress reverts the tag to paragraph. WTF? If I am going to go to the trouble of editing HTML, why does it think it knows better??

Alright, so I decide I need to find a better offline editor that lets me perfect my post before pushing it to the site. After a cursory Google search, I find this page. It's a good start but I really don't want to dork around with a bunch of editors to find one that I like. I poke around half-heartedly and finally stumble across Bytescout Post2Blog, which seems to have a crazy amount of features and strong support of WordPress blogs specifically.

I do a search for a web review of Post2Blog before I get it, though. And I find this freewaregenius review of the product that looks promising.. however, the review also helpfully compares it against Windows Live Writer, which I had glossed over earlier thinking it was specifically for the Windows Live blog service. Boy, am I wrong.

Read the freewaregenius article for more details but I will say right now, Windows Live Writer blows me away. It works great with WordPress and Livejournal. It has a live preview that looks identical to an actual publish. It's phenomenal. I mean it.

Now, Post2Blog is like 95% of the way there -- and in some ways, has some cool features that are better than Live Writer. So I am not getting rid of it yet. But right now, I am too entranced by Live Writer to give Post2Blog a fair assessment.

I know, I don't have an entry for day 4.  That's because I basically screwed up everything I could screw up without killing myself.  I overslept, I was slow getting out of the house, and when I finally got to the Austin Convention Center, I didn't have my SXSWi badge!  I had left it helpfully hanging on a door handle in the entrance hall of my house, where I completely ignored it on my way out.

Anyway, my final day went quite well!  I did a bit more networking, and attended some interesting panels.  I didn't really get into the post-conference parties this year, I probably should have, but now I have something to shoot for, for next year.  :P

( Ok, so the rest of my update is here. )

I did stop at the Town Lake Animal Center on the way home, and I visited the doggies looking for a home. Andrea says that more and more since I've been living with Shelby, I've become a dog person. I think she's right -- I caught myself seriously considering adopting a new little black lab puppy I saw there.. he was so cute and looked sad that he didn't have a warm bed and a big sister dog to hang out with.