Steffen's Tech Blog

You can use the Blogger Post Gadget for your iGoogle homepage. You can use HTML in the text box. If you want more rich text editing click “Save Draft” and you’ll get a link to edit the post in the full Blogger post editor.

What is BlogThis! ? : "BlogThis! is another easy way to make a blog post at your Blogger blog. Just add the BlogThis! link to your browser's toolbar. Clicking this opens a mini-interface to Blogger prepopulated with a link to the web page you are visiting, as well as any text you have highlighted on that page. Add additional text if you wish and then publish or post."

If you are using the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, you can also use ScribeFire to post your blog easily from within the browser. It allows you to drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog. You can even add easily labels to your post. Everything works very fast. As Firefox is a cross-pattform browser, you can use it on Linux/Mac/Windows. You can read more about ScribeFire on http://www.scribefire.com/ where you can also find the link to install it from the Mozilla Add-ons site. Somehow the length of the posts seem to be limited as I have noticed that longer posts (such as my post from March 4, 2008) will be not loaded completely in the ScribFire Editor, but I haven't found any information about the maximum allowed length of a post.

Another easy way to post a message to Blogger is using Google's Dashboard Widget for Mac. Its very basic text formating ( bold and italic ) should be sufficient if you want just post some short lines to your blog without advanced formating, links, images, media files, spelling check. In that case it is much faster than having to start first a browser or a full-blown desktop application. What I am missing is the feature to add labels for the post, so if you want to add labels you need to do this later directly in Blogger. Blogger Dashboard Widget for Mac is available from http://www.google.com/macwidgets/index.html .

As I did use different computers at home (mainly Ubuntu and Mac OS) to write the post, I did appreciate that the document was always online although I had sometimes (especially at the end, when the document was already quite big) problems with lost connections that caused loss of some changes. I didn't experienced this before with smaller documents so I assume that either Google Docs Writer is not yet capable of handling long documents having pretty nasty HTML code inside (see the point about the code listing below ) or there had been connection problems caused by server problems. So I guess if I am about to write another similar post I might want to try a desktop application such as OpenOffice (with Sun Weblog Publisher extension) or I might want to separate the a bigger topic into several smaller posts (which would probably the best). I shouldn't use the Styles "Header 1" or "Header 2" from Google Docs as they let to too big headlines in the blog po...

Today, I finally decided to set up an own blog around technical topics, that I am interested in my spare time. This idea has been greatly motivated by huge amount of very helpful free information that helped me to make switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu and Mac OS X for most of my private PC activities become not only possible but also great fun. It's a simple way of giving back something to the web community of what I did learn so far. Why did I choose Google's blogger to start a blog? Mainly because it seem to provide everything that I was looking for from a blog space. Furthermore, it seemed to be naturally after the trust that I have developed into tools from Google after years of using great free Google tools such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, and many more.