Well, I'm back (again) from a breakdown-induced blogging hiatus. While my wife may argue to the contrary, the breakdown was not mine but of several of the various technologies that make up my daily working environment. I'm fascinated at how quickly blogging habits seem to break down when familiar tools are no longer available. My word processing needs may not be as easy to manage with a different application/platform than what I usually use, but there isn't really a "flow" to the type of writing I usually do in a word processor. There is very definitely a "flow" to weblogging, and mine was broken.
I've tried to use various news aggregators to capture the daily news from my communities, but I'm so used to the aggregator being built into my posting tool (Radio) that I couldn't get around the slight inconveniences of separate applications. It was also frustrating that various forms of RSS feeds behave differently in common RSS aggregators. I can see where this could become very frustrating if there is a bifurcation of the developer community regarding which flavor of RSS they will support.
I did get quite used to Moveable Type, however, and now am stuck in between the two applications. It is difficult to quantify exactly what it is I love about the two tools. Moveable Type feels clean--the interface and workflow "feel" nice. I don't think I can live without TrackBack as I move forward--I've got to figure out how to integrate it into Radio. I really enjoy the out-of-the-box functionality of MT's built-in bookmarklet script, as well.
One concern I haven't resolved--how portable is my weblog? The proprietary database content in either Radio or Moveable Type doesn't seem to be easily extracted and incorporated into another environment. I still feel as if I'm in the "beta" stage of my weblog experiences, so losing content doesn't hurt as much as it might after a longer investment. Is there a way to reverse-process the XML output of an RSS feed and import it into one of the tools?
Well, I've got to get back to work this morning. Here in Charlotte we're still feeling the impact of the big ice storm that blew through here last week--several co-workers still don't have power at home, and my daughter's school is still closed. Grateful to be safe and warm...
10:17:59 AM 
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