Mandarin Design: Cheap Thrills for the Beer-Budget Blogger

Cheap Thrills for the Beer-Budget Blogger
BY CHRISTOPHER LOCKE

"I wasn't going to tell you about this one. I mean, if everybody had it, they'd know about 90% of how I do what I do."

In this article Chris reveals his secret weapons. A toolbox full of secret treasures, mostly cheap or free. Chris Locke has worked in technology as a consultant, journalist, author, and speaker. He started the first Internet business publication 1992 and launched the first web-based e-commerce system in 1994.

Chris co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto which went to #4 on the Business Week bestseller list in 2000 and also wrote Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, selected by Harvard Business Review as a top-10 book of 2001. Read more about the author at his site and his blog.

I've never been connected at anything faster than 56k (which often is more like the 14.4 of yore) so I do most of my blog work off-line. That is, I'm connected and everything, but I don't write in the Blogger edit buffer. btw, I've never worked with any other blogging software, so don't expect a comparative tutorial here. On that score, I'm like: duh! Also, I have a great feeling of loyalty to Ev Williams. Without Blogger, the blog phenomenon might still have happened, yeah, but it wouldn't have exploded the way it did, or have been so grass-roots populist in the profile of its practitioners. So, I like Ev, though I barely know him, and no, I am not planning to migrate to another platform.

Also, I don't give a rat's ass about RSS and all that Big-Tech city slicker shit. What you need to blog is a blank page, a headful of ideas, a heartful of passion and a handful of good tools. I've been online one way or another for something like 20 years. That's not a brag -- I'd give a lot to have those years back, and not be hearing chicks refer to me as an "older man." Jesus! But never mind that, the point is: I been doin this shit for a long old time now. Here are some of the tools I use.

But first, a couple of inevitable digressions. Because, when you get right down to it, who doesn't love a good digression?

The first is that, by "this shit," I don't mean hacking in the usual sense -- coding, knowing which version of XML or PHP or WXYZ is better than which other version and the catechism of the 149 reasons why. No. By "this shit," I mean writing. Words, sentences, paragraphs, zines, blog entries, chapters, books. I'm the kind of guy who will write any word once. And if it feels good, I'll write it again. (You're supposed to chuckle here.) Of course, if you're gonna write today, knowing some HTML doesn't hurt any. You don't need to know any, true, like you don't need to know how to drive a stick-shift anymore. But then your blog will look like you wrote it in MS Word -- which is sadly what a lot a lot of people do. If this is OK by you, and you don't that much mind being thought of as cautious and dim, then go ahead. Leslie Nielsen will think you're cool, even if I don't. Oh wait, it's Jacob, not Leslie. He was the Airplane guy. Not to mention the guy in Forbidden Planet, but that was before your time. Nevermind.

The second is that I've always had easy access to the Big-Tech Power Tools -- Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and like that -- but I've also had to work on machines with less than enough memory (by definition: any computer ever made), which tend to crash a lot when you get 30 or 40 balls in the air, which is how I like to work. ADHD is my friend!

So, digressions out of the way, here are some of the (pretty) cheap low-fi but powerful tools I couldn't write without.

Cheap Thrills for the Beer-Budget Blogger BY CHRISTOPHER LOCKE "I wasn't going to tell you about this one. I mean, if everybody had it, they'd know about 90% of how I do what I do." In this article Chris reveals his secret weapons. A toolbox full of secret treasures, mostly cheap or free. Chris Locke has worked in technology as a consultant, journalist, author, and speaker. He started the first Internet business publication 1992 and launched the first web-based e-commerce system in 1994. Chris co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto which went to #4 on the Business Week bestseller list in 2000 and also wrote Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, selected by Harvard Business Review as a top-10 book of 2001. Read more about the author at his site and his blog. I've never been connected at anything faster than 56k (which often is more like the 14.4 of yore) so I do most of my blog work off-line. That is, I'm connected and everything, but I don't write in the Blogger edit buffer. btw, I've never worked with any other blogging software, so don't expect a comparative tutorial here. On that score, I'm like: duh! Also, I have a great feeling of loyalty to Ev Williams. Without Blogger, the blog phenomenon might still have happened, yeah, but it wouldn't have exploded the way it did, or have been so grass-roots populist in the profile of its practitioners. So, I like Ev, though I barely know him, and no, I am not planning to migrate to another platform. Also, I don't give a rat's ass about RSS and all that Big-Tech city slicker shit. What you need to blog is a blank page, a headful of ideas, a heartful of passion and a handful of good tools. I've been online one way or another for something like 20 years. That's not a brag -- I'd give a lot to have those years back, and not be hearing chicks refer to me as an "older man." Jesus! But never mind that, the point is: I been doin this shit for a long old time now. Here are some of the tools I use. But first, a couple of inevitable digressions. Because, when you get right down to it, who doesn't love a good digression? The first is that, by "this shit," I don't mean hacking in the usual sense -- coding, knowing which version of XML or PHP or WXYZ is better than which other version and the catechism of the 149 reasons why. No. By "this shit," I mean writing. Words, sentences, paragraphs, zines, blog entries, chapters, books. I'm the kind of guy who will write any word once. And if it feels good, I'll write it again. (You're supposed to chuckle here.) Of course, if you're gonna write today, knowing some HTML doesn't hurt any. You don't need to know any, true, like you don't need to know how to drive a stick-shift anymore. But then your blog will look like you wrote it in MS Word -- which is sadly what a lot a lot of people do. If this is OK by you, and you don't that much mind being thought of as cautious and dim, then go ahead. Leslie Nielsen will think you're cool, even if I don't. Oh wait, it's Jacob, not Leslie. He was the Airplane guy. Not to mention the guy in Forbidden Planet, but that was before your time. Nevermind. The second is that I've always had easy access to the Big-Tech Power Tools -- Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and like that -- but I've also had to work on machines with less than enough memory (by definition: any computer ever made), which tend to crash a lot when you get 30 or 40 balls in the air, which is how I like to work. ADHD is my friend! So, digressions out of the way, here are some of the (pretty) cheap low-fi but powerful tools I couldn't write without.
	TextPad TextPad is a text editor, not a word processor. Yes, Virginia, there's a difference, and it's a crucial one. Text editors manipulate ASCII. HTML is ASCII. Hey, could there be a connection? There's a long history and lots of explanation that could go with all this, but the short form is: get this tool. You'll thank me. It has more features than a Swiss Army knife. You won't learn them all at once (or some of them, ever). No sweat. Two things (of the many I could pick) are especially worth noting. Thing 1: TextPad comes with "clip libraries" that dock to the side of your screen. One is for HTML tags. It's simple to use and not all that sophisticated, but you can extend this by adding your own code (or text) snippets. There are also lots of other contributed libraries and tools available free on the site. Thing2: TextPad can search across a folder -- or your entire hard drive. And not just for text or html files. You can find a phrase in that old Word doc or Power Point slide show you built... let's see now, when was it? ...and stashed, hmmm, exactly where? TextPad will find the file for you and display the relevant line as a hypertext link to that exact location in the target document. If the file IS NOT ASCII (a.k.a., plain text) for god's sake don't open it in TextPad. Or if you do, don't save it or you'll mung the thing beyond recognition. Stick to txt and html files, though, and you can find, open, modify, save to your heart's delight. TextPad runs these searches (without any need for prior indexing) faster than anything Microsoft has yet produced for finding files. What's wrong with those people? Anyway, even if this all sounds like ancient Greek, just trust me, this feature alone is worth the cost of the toll, which is (still!) only 27 bucks. Oh yeah, and TextPad implements full regular-expression search, and search & replace. But nevermind that for now. I'll tell you all about regular expressions when you're a little older. Disclaimer: if you pull down the TextPad Help tab and click Acknowledgements, you'll find me on the list. This is because I unmercifully hounded the developer about five years ago.
	CSE HTML Validator HTML Validator checks your code and tells you where you screwed up. It has a billion switches and can be a real pain in the ass, but you can turn off most of the really anal retentive nagging, as I did long ago, and just look for outright errors. Errors will cause your pages to not do what you want. Errors are bad. As to "invalid nesting" and suchlike, I could give a hoot; sue me. Note that there is a free version. The full Pro version is pricey, and not recommended unless you want to avoid invalid nesting and know what's "deprecated" in the latest W3C spec -- i.e., you are anal retentive. Disclaimer: I own the Pro version. Draw your own conclusions.
	ClipMate I couldn't live without this one. Saves the last 200 (or howevermany) things you've copied or cut in the course of your day, week, month, &cetera. You can have multiple collections, one for the usual drek, one or more "safe" folders for things you don't want to lose. Your mind, say. Your identity. Search is fast and cuts across all collections if you tell it to. ClipMate also keeps the URL of the page you copied something from. Think about that one. There's a free trial download. Check it out. Indispensable and hugely recommended.
	Coffee Cup Free Image Viewer For a free tool (actually, you get two), this software does all manner of neat stuff. Not least, it gives you a small lightning-fast-loading FTP client to transmit images to your blog. Select as many as you want from the Explorer-like Image Viewer Plus (the other tool that comes with) and hit the little rocket ship icon. Whee! It also slices and dices (literally), zips files, creates tables of thumbnails, and god knows whatelse. Plus, you can drag thumbnails into your graphics editor, which is way better than wondering what "spam-chick-with-real-bad-attitude-problem.jpg" was all about when you saved it off a month ago. As they say: at this price, you can't afford not to.
	SnagIt I wasn't going to tell you about this one. I mean, if everybody had it, they'd know about 90% of how I do what I do. Of course, this may be a counter-plug for many. Yeah, that's it... take my advice and do not buy this tool. But if you do, you'll be able to capture anything -- and I mean anything -- that appears on your screen, then screw around with it in all sorts of ways. Lots of fun and enormously useful. But hey, weren't you saving up for that new flat panel TV?
	TrayColor TrayColor is a tiny freeware tool that can pick any color off any open window and covert it to the appropriate HTML color code. You need this. Who knows who created this elegant little thing, but you can grab it from the link above.
	Teleport Pro How do you save a local copy of your blog? A lot of people have asked me this. Here's one answer, and a very good one. Hell, you can rip IBM's entire site if your disk drive's big enough -- and you're that bored. I once tried to download the entire internet, but my computer blew up. Along with SnagIt (and Google Images), this is one of the professional plagiarist's tools of choice!
	Ulead SmartSaver Pro OK, so this one costs a few bucks (like I think about 60), but for doing stuff with images without having to load Photoshop (or better, Imageready) it's worth it. Does better than average file-size optimization, creates rollovers way easy, slices images and creates tables from the slices. All kindsa things. Pepperoni extra.
	IrfanView IrfanView is a small, fast, free graphic viewer. You can display thumbnails of an entire folder, then open selected files in your specified graphics editor(s). Very nice. The full-screen view is especially useful for that delicate one-handed work.
More... David Newberger interviewed Christopher Locke this month (January 2006) with 10 Questions with Chris Locke on Blogging. We highly recommended this interview where Rageboys insight, foresight, and hindsight on Blogging is presented with questions and answers.