Regarding those using Firefox Live Bookmarks, shutup. I don't care. Planet TT-Forums' RSS feed works in straight Firefox, works in google Reader, and just about everything I use. I don't know what the hell is going on with other people's RSS readers when it comes to the entries from my VOX account, but Live Bookmarks is so-far the only thing that I've seen croak with my own eyes.
If you can work out what is causing it, I would like to know. Regardless of how left of centre a use case is, if something is broken, I like to fix it.
Interesting that a new bit of software (or two or three) for a phone/pc can change someones behaviors so much. Blogging has generally been something I've been successfully avoiding for the past few months. It's been a combination of Wordpress pissing me off too much, and everything just being too fucking-well awkward to really work with.
Nokia has sparked a bit of change in that regard.
I've been playing around with a bit of software lately called Nokia Photos. It started off as some silly program called Nokia Lifeblog, which, I think, they realised was a bit too wanky a name. Decent concept though. Basicly, it acts like Google Picasa, or F-Spot in Linux in that it's a photo managing software. Nice timeline view, and nice organizer. Good tagging support (although I'm yet to give it a good thrashing), good support for SixApart (TypePad, VOX, and others) services, good support for Flickr. Overall clean interface, doesn't waste too much screen real estate.
It misses out on some more advanced photo editing features, but the overall aim of the program seems to be more the 'digital scrapbook'. More about that in a seccond. However, for it's purpose, it does a pretty nice job. Photos and videos are fetched from your N series phone using the phones built-in Lifeblog software (if you're familiar with that software, then the whole post is essentially me ranting on about how much I like it. Go find something good to read, you'll get nothing of interest here) and existing synchronization conduits.
So-far, I've yet to even try RAW support. Not even going to touch it, I already keep a mirror of my photo collection in JPEG for external app support and general use/viewing. Raws are for special work. It imports in all the usual ways, for me, it's importing from a mounted SMB share (Drive Y: in Windows), without copying the files to my desktop PC). It does a good job with importation aswell. It doesn't get confused with duplicate photos either. I can do multiple full-folder (as in, import straight from Y:\Photos\) import without re-importing photos I've already imported. I can do a sync with my phone and not have it dupe earlier photos that I had saved to my photo collection on my server. It just works. F-Spot on Linux wasn't good in this regard. Special care had to be taken not to re-import a directory already scanned by it.
Now, onto the more interesting parts. In the timeline view, you also see what else Nokia Photos has been importing from your phone, and why it fills the 'Digital Scrapbook' category in my mind. It filches off all your SMS and MMS correspondence aswell. Most people are probably thinking 'Why would you want your sms' in your photo album, dickhead!' by this stage - what I also thought to begin with. However, from a blogging perspective, it all starts to come together. Being able to see your correspondance, your party photos, everything and anything inbetween from any event, all nicely timelined together, you start to build a lot of ammo for writing blogs, for letting everyone else, your friends, your family, even those weirdoes you met on IRC (Hello, #tycoon :P) know what you're getting up to.
Which really, is pretty much the whole point of blogging; Letting people know what you're up to. Anything else is more a newletter.
Now, when I pull my finger out of my arse, I'll start putting words down and getting more blog posts out (Be prepared for some hypocrisy :P, it could very well take a month or two).
Well, I'm trialing out moving over to the VOX social networking site, as apposed to using my wordpress setup on my website. Reasons for this blasphemy? Sure, plenty of them. For the most part, it's integration and ease of use that I'm concerned about. And flexibility. Vox doesn't appear to have any sort of file size limit, upload limit, or any of the like. I can upload videos, pictures, blog posts... the usual fare. I can do it from some finely crafted Nokia software as well. On both my mobile phone, and their PC software. It supports what I assume is a fairly standardized interface aswell, so it shouldn't be much of a hassle to use another external application.
Another handy feature is that it will talk nicely to Photobucket/Imageshack, Flickr, Youtube, and all that jazz. My phone aswell can already talk half decently to Flickr, although I prefer to work with flickr from a desktop/laptop of my own.
Pretty much, it's integrating better with the devices that I'm using more.
We'll see where this leads.
Nnn'dish
