Back in Action!

I've been frustrated in my blogging by a bug somewhere between Picasa (the program) and PicasaWeb (the service) and Blogger.com --- all Google properties, so one might hope they would play well together. When I first took up Picasa it was great: I could select some images, click on one button and it would resize them all, upload to Picasaweb, and open a blog post editor. For a year or more, though, this workflow has been broken. I've been searching for alternatives for a long time. Finally yesterday I realized that by replacing the very limited (and limiting!) Picasaweb, I can almost recreate my workflow, using free and Open Source tools! I'll be using mapivi to select images; and simple shell script (that I wrote) to resize the images using ImageMagick; and scp to copy them to a webserver where they'll be accessible to blogger.com. The script will also print out a snippet of HTML that I can cut-n-paste into the blogger.com post editor - this is the only step that's not as shiny as the old Picasa-based workflow but I can live with it. Long live Open Source!