Blogging, iBlog, and Panther


I walked away from blogging for a while because I wanted 2 things. I want a nice client to write the blog in and I also want to be able to write it in a distributed fashion.

The blogging software I am using is pretty much exactly what I want. iBlog is easy to use, has a lot of features, lets me drag music/photos/attachments into an entry, it lets me host it on my .Mac homepage , its pretty much what I want except that it keeps all of its info in the file system. So how does this get wrapped with Panther ? Well in Panther they have a new kind of iDisk. The old version of iDisk was simply a remote drive that you could use. That was kinda annoying because you had to wait for every operation to finish and my upload speed isn't that great. The new iDisk lets you do automatic sychronization to all your Macs in the background with a local copy. This is nice because I can put in symbolic links to the iBlog directories and have them in my iDisk. Viola! I now have a distributed client based blogging software that will let me write entries when I am offline on my laptop and also when I am online on my desktop system. This sort of thing can be done for most programs that run on the Mac because everything is so decentralized.

Here is what my filesystem looks like:

/Users/sam/Library:> find . -name iBlog -exec ls -l {} \;
lrwxr-xr-x 1 sam staff 54 17 Oct 19:31 ./Application Support/iBlog -> /Volumes/iDisk/Sites/Library/Application Support/iBlog
lrwxr-xr-x 1 sam staff 41 17 Oct 19:32 ./Caches/iBlog -> /Volumes/iDisk/Sites/Library/Caches/iBlog
lrwxr-xr-x 1 sam staff 34 17 Oct 19:31 ./iBlog -> /Volumes/iDisk/Sites/Library/iBlog

Obviously this isn't for the none-Unix Mac user yet. Maybe someone should write a program that makes your application synchronized using this method automatically?

Posted: Sat - October 18, 2003 at 11:45 AM           |

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