Zempt

Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.

Trying to see if Zempt works for me even though my primary interest in TypePad is to see if I prefer posting through a web interface.

The Importance of the Interface

Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.

On her weblog Anita commented that I am writing longer posts here than I usually do in my weblog Coffee and Oranges. I had noticed this myself, though three days hardly seems enough to make a trend. For CaO, I write my entries into a text editor (a very nice one called NoteTabPro.) I then run a script that converts the more or less plain text into HTML, wraps the template around it, and ftps the results to my website host. I’ve been using this editor for years, and feel very comfortable with it, so I was surprised that my usual verbosity became more apparent when I started writing “Five Acres.”

I looked at the input screen for TypePad which is nice and clean (surely I can say that much, despite the Non Disclosure Agreement.) Then I looked at my editor which was ready with my weblog text file. The thing that immediately occurred to me is that the font sizes of the two applications are very different, with TypePad being much smaller. I fill up the screen in my editor a lot more quickly than I do the input box for TypePad. Filled up screen seems to equal time to post for me. I think there may be more involved, but have changed the font size of my editor to see if that makes a change in my behavior. In fact, as I wrote this post in Zempt, I found myself growing uncomfortable when I reached the bottom of its box.

Vanity publishing

Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.

I didn’t like the way my personal photo looked on the sidebar, so I spent too much time today taking a self-protrait with more muted colors. When I originally read the documentation for the digital camera after I bought it last fall, I vaguely noticed it had a time lapse feature, so I dug out the manual and read about it. I found a place to set up a tripod, and then ran back and forth between the camera, chair and camera docking station until I got a photo that I liked. I felt very silly, but not enough to stop.

Anyway, this is what I look like: the only digital processing was to slightly lighten the photo in Paint Shop Pro since the original was a little dark. Digital photography brings a whole new slant to the concept of “unretouched” photography.