I can post again!

My Posts are a little out of order a Post on my visit to Williams F1 appears behind this one it was posted as a draft - but got overtaken by two posts produced since - so it appears back in the time line - here if you want to see it.

I have been using an off-line Editor to produce my Posts for some time. I originally set up my Blog so that friends and family could follow my cycle ride from Bangkok to Saigon. It was a small organised tour run by Symbiosis Travel, luggage is transported by van. If you are interested they are doing their final one this year - Bangkok to Saigon Challenge. I would certainly recommend it as a great way to see some fascinating countries and their cultures.

On the trip I found it was sometimes very difficult to find a decent Internet connection to download the days Post. I needed an offline way of producing my Posts, along with the relevant photographs which I could then download when connected to the Internet. That way I could write my Post at the end of each day whilst it was fresh in my mind. So I chose a Program called Zoundry Raven. A web search for such Editors does not seem to throw up a large number of Editors and quite a few of them appear to have stopped development.

What I really wanted was a program that was simple to use and interface to my Google Blogger and Picasaweb accounts. (Picasaweb is where the photographs are stored). I also wanted to keep a copy of my Blog locally available. Zoundry Raven does this - it will synchronise with a Blog so that it remains up to date. (This means it will download older posts and posts put on the Blog by other means/programs.)

The trouble is that, presumably because there is not much commercial interest, Raven development seems to have stopped, or rather gone Open Source and stopped development. I have to say that the program is pretty reliable, but as you can imagine there are some foibles. I have in excess of 300 posts and so when I open Zoundry on my computer it takes around 5 minutes and consumes quite a lot of memory. When I Publish a post the first time after opening it fails, when I repeat it works. It is also strict in its implementation of the version of HTML it supports and so embedding bits of other websites such as Google Maps can be problematic - although not impossible. The bottom line is that it works and works well.

Yesterday it stopped publishing Posts in either draft or final form. The errors that came back were not that easy to understand containing references to various Zoundry procedure calls. My first thought was that it was a glitch and so closed the program and re-opened it - no luck. I then re-booted my Desktop - no luck. I then deleted some of the temporary files that Zoundry holds - no luck. I re-installed Zoundry (without losing the data) - no luck. I removed Zoundry (without losing the data) and re-installed it - no luck. By now I was beginning to think that I had finally gone beyond the program's limits. So I made a copy of my Blog (you can export from Blogger - it does not export the pictures as they are links to Picasaweb storage - but does store the rest - in my case around 4Mb of data. I also checked out a program to make a complete copy of my Blog - but have not run it yet. I presume that it will also copy all the picture data and so I would expect the size of the copy to be a few Gb. Having said that how does it differentiate between links and linked pictures! (and where do the videos go?)

When travelling I use a Microsoft program called LiveWriter - and then synchronise back to Zoundry when back on my Desktop computer. Live Writer is much more up to date and I would probably switch as it allows add-ins to make the program even more versatile. There is a but though. the but is I cannot find ways of getting Live Writer to download the current state of the Blog. There are times when you want to be able to refer to old posts off-line. also I am not sure quite how Live writer deals with pictures - given that most people have reasonable bandwidth connections I tend to download high-resolution pictures (4-6Mb) which can be clicked on for a closer look. Live Writer will allow quality of the originals to be posted but maintains a separate Album on me Picasaweb store. Since there are limits on how many pictures an Album can contain I am not sure quite sure what to do when that limit is approached.

So I started up Live Writer on my desktop - this required me to load various updates and then re-boot my desktop Is it me or is Microsoft software more likely to require a re-boot.) Then I had to go through the inevitable tick box page - no I really don't want Bing as my default Search engine. Finally Live Writer was back up to date and I wrote a short post which failed to publish. I tried Live Writer on my Laptop - again it failed. With Live Writer there was a slightly more informative error message. On searching it turns out that Blogger was having problems and many people could not even use it on-line. The Blogger status was not at all informative and at one point claimed the problem had been fixed when there were still people reporting problems with Live writer.

So I gave up and the next morning, as if by magic, it was all working again. I could use Zoundry - but it is a reminder that I need to check out a more up to date way of writing my Blog. I also need to improve my understanding of best to maintain a backup.