Pants in Motion

I tried adding the Atom feed for Crumpet’s blog to NewsNetWire Lite today, and oddly enough the software didn’t understand what to do with the XML. Possible solutions included trying to find a newer version of the software, finding the money to buy the full version of NewsNetWire, or looking for another news aggregator.

As I’m both extremely poor and a curious cat, I chose the third option. I found NewsFire, which feels so much more Mac-like than NewsNetWire (and it’s easier to say, too!). I can never go past stylish eye-candy, and even in beta NewsFire feels very solid. I’ll definitely be looking at paying for this when it reaches release. Most importantly, I can keep track of what Crumpet and Gizo have been doing with their sites.

I also found out that you can add and edit posts in WordPress using dedicated apps rather than the web interface. When you think about it, it’s pretty obvious that blog editing apps would exist, but there you go — I hadn’t. There’s also the problem for me of needing to update my blog both at home on the PowerBook and at work with a PC. The PC freeware/shareware scene simply sucks (I’m still looking for a newsreader with as much style as the Mac apps), so I may have to stick with the web interface at the office. Anyhow, on the Mac side of things I’m trying Ranchero’s MarsEdit app, which was twitchy with WordPress 1.2 (you could add posts but they wouldn’t actually appear until you edited them in the web interface, which kinda defeated the purpose). Following the instructions found here to patch the xmlrpc.php file fixed the problem.

There’s another OS X app called Ecto that I want to try out (which also has a Windows version, possibly solving my PC/Mac problem), but MarsEdit seems pretty decent in the meantime.

It’s amazing what you can achieve with a day off work. I should do this more often.