Always willing to oblige I have made the said change and this post is by way of testing that it works correctly. If all goes well James should be seeing this post in all its glory via his choice of RSS reader.

If not, I’ll be back.

Have I typed enough?

Yes?

How about a picture of a cat?

If you’re wondering why I bring up such a morbid question its not that I’ve just been delivered some news of impending health problems or other notice of doom. I just found out that the father of the author (Daniel Jalkut) of the software (MarsEdit) I use to blog passed away and, in a timely correspondence, a user brought up the subject of wanting to blog as much as he can for his son before he dies.

In my case I don’t suppose anyone will think to check my hosting payments and that within a nominal amount of time after the next payment became due the blog would cease to exist along with myself. With so much being published onto the internet on a daily basis its a fact of life that the scenario will be played out many times.

Of course there are free alternatives such as Blogspot and even social networking sites but while I don’t know anything of their retention policies nothing can be classed as permanent as Geocites users will tell you.

Maybe its a question for future digital archaeologists to answer as they pick through old backups and long forgotten caches.

In the meantime I offer Daniel my condolences.

In addition to giving myself more things to think about than necessary I also took the plunge and updated WordPress. My theme hadn’t been compatible initially and I noted earlier today that they had recently updated it. It was relatively trouble free. The early versions of the theme didn’t properly support widgets so I has side bar modules installed and a WordPress widget disabler. It seems that its the exact opposite now as it works with widgets but the sidebar module plugin was a bit dead. In real terms it means that my random flickr pictures are now the latest in my photo stream and I’ve not replaced the counter that was ominously counting down to my 40th (which is on the 30th in case you want to send me presents, cash or alcohol).

I’ve been using MarsEdit for a couple of months now through trial and eventual purchase and its my editor of choice for blogging, and so it should be as its a cracking little application. It’s all but perfect… but. That but is a real biggie for me and almost stopped me buying it however a glimmer of light from the developer suggested I might see my beloved feature in a future update. I’m getting ahead of myself now and I’ve not told you what my problem is.

MarsEdit has superb Flickr integration letting you pick from your photostream and select the size of thumb you want, but this can’t be done when uploading media from your computer. It’s a glaring omission as its something that can be done with ease from the WordPress web interface publishing page. The problem with using the web is that Safari doesn’t like the WordPress editor and strips out carriage returns when publishing. I know I could use Firefox but I’d got so used to MarsEdit on the trial, starting Firefox was a second step beyond having to open an url in Safari to blog and ultimately an inconvenience.

All that said, its only an issue for me if the source image is bigger than 400px (due to my current theme) and the image isn’t on Flickr (which I prefer to use for my photos rather than any other graphic flotsam and jetsam). What prompted me to blog now is that there has been an incremental update to MarsEdit and I had a fanciful hope to find a resizing/thum creation feature however it was not to be. Don’t let this stop you buying MarsEdit as I’ve already said its superb and the more people badgering the developer for better graphic handling the better.

Ae you still here? Go and buy it now!