So I made a couple of test entries to this thing. I might delete them later, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see them below. The only reason I’ve kept them so far is that Laura commented on them, and I don’t want to delete Laura! That would be sad.

I’m not sure I like this Movable Type thing. Eric mentioned that he was thinking of switching to it the other day, so I thought I’d try it out. It seems to work okay. I don’t particularly care for the default page layout, but I’m not enough of an HTML person these days to think about changing it. Maybe I’ll try this for a bit. Or maybe I’ll use some other site if I want to keep a weblog. Laura’s mentioned LiveJournal. It looks like it might be acceptable. And the Mac clients look like they might be acceptable.

Speaking of which… Why is there no decent Mac OS X client for the Blogger API (which Movable Type uses)? So far I’ve tried EspressoBlog, iBlog, BlogApp and Kung-Log. I’m using the latter right now, and it seems the best. But it still sucks. None of them can do something as simple as WYSIWYG editing of the post. I have to write my own HTML tags. I haven’t written my own HTML in years. I should be able to choose “bold” from the menu, and have it work like a word processor. I should be able to drag in URLs and make them links without having to type HTML links. And I shouldn’t have to worry about character set issues. It should work like how iChat does things. I like iChat pretty well (hey, I might be online now. Look for akosut@mac.com), user-interface wise. It would be nice if it supported something other than AIM, though. Jabber maybe. I’d especially like it if it were pluggable. I’d love to take the Zephyr code I wrote for my senior project and make it work with the iChat user interface. That would be cool.

I keep meaning to update the Zephyr stuff and get it to compile again (it stopped compiling a few CodeWarrior revisions okay) and maybe port it to Cocoa. Certainly get it to work on Mac OS X (Greg and I wrote it in Carbon, but for Mac OS 9 only). The presence of iChat both encourages me and discourages me. It makes me want to copy the iChat interface (it was already similar), but depresses me, because iChat already has that interface, and does it better than I ever could. So really, I just want to write a backend plugin to iChat. I’m not much of a GUI person.

Except that I know a bad GUI when I see one. Which brings us back to this weblog app thing. Maybe I should write one. Like I don’t have enough projects I’ve thought about doing. You’d think I’d work on one of them, given the free time I have. For now, maybe I’ll stick with Kung-Log. At least it’s better than a Web form. Although if Chimera ever adds Cocoa spell checking to their form implementation, it might not be much better.