Blog block!: Unblocked

Oh my goodness, you wouldn’t believe the frustration and pain I’ve been through with this bleeding blog.

What with one thing and another, it’s been too long since I posted to Open.

I could blame a week of holiday, followed by a trans-Atlantic hopscotch of a meetings schedule…

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I could ape Hugh MacLeod and blame an unhealthily deep involvement with Twitter. But I won’t – I think I’ve got my Tweeting under control…

But actually it’s been a down to…

…getting a Mac.

Which led to…

…a big fallout with Ecto and some other blog editors (I really *do* miss the Microsoft Live Writer / OneNote combo that was central to my distributed blogging workflow for so long).

Basically blogging away happily for the past couple of years I ha settled into a rhythm of using those two brilliant software packages in tandem, making it easy to capture text and URLs and almost effortless to put in any image I wanted at any time. A bit like a an (analogue) writer of the last century who can’t get his favourite notebooks or type on his favourite typewriter it completely threw me out of kilter.

I lost my blogging mojo.


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Anyway, I’m hoping now – after having half-written a dozen posts and abandoned them in about four different editors that I have managed to settle down with a combination of Ecto along with CaptureMe as a surrogate for the genius (which I took for granted) of Windows’ OneNote’s screen-clipping function.

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It feels right. Funny, isn’t it, how these things work?

5 responses to “Blog block!: Unblocked”

  1. Welcome back! The long term benefits will definitely pay off after the initial switch glitches ;) I personally use a combination of Grab and Imagewell for images – really recommend it.

  2. Thanks, Jonathan!

    Grab didn’t really work out for me… it was the immediacy of the snap and paste function in OneNote that really fitted in well with my workflow.

    Euan Semple’s recommended a free app called Skitch – which I have to say on first sight looks superb…

  3. Hi Tone. Not sure exactly what your need is, but GrabUp looks kinda interesting. http://www.tuaw.com/2008/04/15/grabup/

  4. Hey Antony, SHIFT-COMMAND-3 combination takes a screenshot of whole screen. SHIFT-COMMAND-4 gives you a cross cursor which you can drag like one-note to capture an area of the screen. Both of these drop an image file on the desktop. Hit CONTROL with the SHIFT-COMMAND-4 combination to copy captured area to the clipboard.

  5. Cheers Rob and Jason – great tips. BTW – apart fromt he amazing Skitch am now trying out Curio on Jim Byford’s say-so – looks very good indeed (but ‘spensive once the trial is over).

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