Old Florida
As a native Floridian who has moved on to more industrial, colder pastures, I sometimes have a tough time convincing people that Florida is more than Disney World and the Beach. There's a tremendous amount of lost biodiversity in Florida, a state that was, up until recently, more swamp than society.
My friend Debbie forwarded me some old time pictures (in a PDF available here) of the old days. Rob has a good sense of what Florida is... a hundred different ways to die at the hands of animals.
The Best Blogging Tool
Like my previous blog, I use WordPress as the nuts and bolts behind this blog. And (I imagine) like other blogging platforms and services, there's an online editor for blogging, as well as a combination of official and third party offline editors that sync to your blog.
All of these, at least for WordPress, are horrible.
They're horrible because they focus on how the content will ultimately look, instead of what the content actually *is*. The UIs for all of these are cluttered with a kitchen sink's worth of formatting buttons, uploaders, linkers, and so on. We're practically one step away from just having the tool create the content for you, a la the "AutoContent Wizard" from Microsoft PowerPoint.
That's why the best blogging tool is a good, old-fashioned, text editor. Nothing fancy. Nothing extreme. In fact, the lower resolution, the better, because that other stuff just gets in the way.
Eventually, yes, you'll need to upload pictures or add links in, and then it might make more sense to use a GUI. But blogging is about writing. So write.
A Fresh Start
I've been reborn.
At least on the Internet, that is. Rather than spend time on my old blog at Philonoist.net, I went out and registered my name. Though this may make it easier to stalk me, I think that by having more personal ownership will, perhaps, make it more likely for me to blog.