I can’t leave this little thing alone

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Sometimes it’s like this.

You love something so much that you can’t stop playing with it long after you know you should move on.

The ever-wonderful Kathy Sierra waxes deftly about this, the staying in the ‘comfort zone’ when you intuitively know you should be stretching. [As an aside, if you don’t read her blog at least once a week you’re an idiot. Period. Copy and paste her feed link into your rss aggregator/feed reader of choice now.]

Back to the story…

The same issue of ‘comfort zones and not moving on’ goes with blog editors (yes, my current hobby horse).

I’m writing this with RocketPost, because despite all of its crashingly obvious faults It still remains the best blog editor I have had the pleasure of working with (even though It has now developed a new‘ feature: It automatically capitalises the letter i when ever I type It, as you can see, But somehow leaves lower case I alone sometimes. I wonder If the developers have been watching that‘ Le’ts Sexy Englis’h video too much. And now I notice that It puts apostrophes In bizarre places even though I typed them correctly — sigh! And It has stopped converting a double hyphen into an em-dash…)

But I digress.

The reason I am sticking with RocketPost for this post (but would strongly recommend you stay well away from it) Is that I am mighty annoyed with the latest betas from Qumana and ecto.

One of my principle guiding philosophies with any web software Is that It has to be simple to install. My clients are not simpletons, but as compatriot Trevor Cook notes, not many of them are terribly web-savvy. So asking them to understand a philosophically new way of working with the internet (web 2.0) Is made extra difficult (as If It was’nt difficult enough) because they have to jump through multiple, confusing hoops to get anything to work.

… Post now being transferred to BlogJet for continued creation, so you can understand What I’m typing without your head exploding.

*******

Back to the Qumana and Ecto betas…

To get the latest Qumana beta to work I also have to download a java file. But I’m not told that during installation, nor given the opportunity to download it then. I am told that the installation has completed, not given the opportunity to have Qumana automatically open up (instead I get some stupid [in my eyes because there is no explanation of what it is or how to use it] large ‘Q’ in front of everything on my screen up in a corner. When I do finally go to Start / Programs and fire up Qumana it then gives me an error box telling me I’m missing a java file, pauses for long enough for me to wonder if it has crashed my computer, then fires up a browser window and wanders over to a website to allow me to download the file.

Eventually I get all of my downloading and installing done (“bloody great waste of time” says Mrs BetterComms and for once I’m on her side — why wasn’t it in the installation package?) and so I fire up Qumana. It asks me to give some info about my blog so that it can auto-connect to it.

But it fails to find my blog and then gives me an undecipherable error message that causes me to bang my head on the desk in frustration because I am not geek enough to understand what it is asking. What is inane about this is that the non-beta Qumana v2 which I have already gone through the hassle of configuring doesn’t have its settings transferred to the beta v3. I had enough trouble getting v2 connected.

And as if that weren’t enough, on top of that I cannot move or get rid of the annoying ‘Q’ at the top left of my screen, which stops me from being able to use, for example, my graphics tools because I cannot get to key tools to edit images. Grrrrrrr!

But BlogJet found and installed this blog easily – no fuss, just add login username and password and Bob is my proverbial mother’s brother. [“Bob’s your uncle” is a phrase the British use to indicate how simple something is; those of us who remember back to days of schoolboy Latin will also remember the phrase ‘QED’, which my personal musical hero*  the sublime Thomas Dolby used to devastating effect in his Valley Girl song, “Airhead” — Tom sang, “quod erat demonstrandum, baby”, to which a background female vocalist, in Valley Girl accent, replied, “Oooh, you speak French!” ]

And Ecto is no better. I download the zip file from ecto’s bizarrely and unintuitively domain-named site (‘geek cool’ domain names are not cool for business folks who are struggling with real-life business issues and who see the internet as another waste of time), go to install it, and get told I need to download yet another file for the thing to work. And this download takes about an hour on a 128k connection — estimate that it takes about 2–3 hours on dialup.

[UPDATE: after taking an hour to download, I get an error message saying it can’t install some bit of code, but the exe file won’t let me try cranking up ecto again. Arrgghhh!!!]

No, “not happy Jan”, as we say here in Australia.

Sticking with BlogJet for the moment, but wishing that RocketPost will come back from the grave…

And fellow traveller on this blog editor journey, Dave Briggs, has eruditely suggested that, piggybacking on the success of the International Association of Nobodies, we start a new association: Blogger’s Off Line League Of Content Kreation Systems.

As Dave himself says,

Spelling ‘creation’ with a ‘k’ will certainly add to our appeal to the kidz, though the acronym of this putative campaign may cause some difficulties

I wholeheartedly concur with his nomenclative suggestion, noting that the ‘k’ in ‘kreation’ will not only appeal to the kidz (always a good thing to do), but also to the radical and ‘young at heart’ of all of we more mature and emotionally stable members of the community.

Anyone care to create a logo?

back to the story…

Tagged as: blogging, tools