google is monkeying around with accounts ...

Google's really messed this blogging thing up: I'm too lazy to look up the details, but I think blogger.com and blogspot.com merged and then were bought by google. Now, google is deactivating all the original blogger/blogspot accounts. They have a "migration" thing in place to move everyone to google accounts, but they've got something screwed up because people can't log in to their old accounts to do the migration (see here for gory details). I *think* this blog will be safe, but I made a backup just in case. If the migration goes okay I'll post again in a few days. If not, this blog will remain up but obsolete: in that case, go to my home page where I'll post a link to a new blog.

See you on the flipside!

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!