Hello 'Hershman,' Goodbye Woodward? This item is almost two months old, but following a trail of blog comments just led me there today -- even though I get weekly e-mail alerts from the story's source. I don't know how I missed it, but I'm glad to have added it to my bookmark list. Thanks, Mountain Laureate, for that pointer, and also this one. All three links are about the difficulty of staying optimistic in the journalism business, and the satisfaction of finding reporters who are still fighting the good fight. Belated or not, I'll link this up to my main blog too.

Welcoming old colleague Jerry Lanson to the blogspace (more musings always welcome, Jerry) has inspired me to add one of my infrequent comments on this old Blogger blog of mine.

The Blogger interface gets better and better, but I'm still doing most of my weblogging with Userland Radio. I like the secure feeling of having the master copy of everything on my own computer, as well as the convenience of the built-in RSS aggregator and the fact that Radio supports the RSS standard.

But there's a lot to be said for being able to tap into Blogger (or Manila, or Typepad) from anywhere. If I still had an active GPRS cellphone connection, I'd be tempted to switch to a system that let me post blog entries from there.

I notice that Dan Gillmor has switched to Typepad for his new "grassroots journalism" blog after years with Radio... and Typepad's parent, Moveable Type, has some local advocates who might offer a community server I could use.

In Cambridge, courtesy of Harvard Law School, I did my RedLiner blog with Userland's other product, Manila, which cooperates with Radio in some useful ways. Userland's founder, Dave Winer, also has been in the forefront of podcasting, which I'm hope to start doing in the near future.

Watching Boomsday Sideways and Beyond the Esplanade are the two pieces of one day's Knox-centric blogging. Eventually I'll not only sort out what I have to say, but where to say it.

I've been very happy with the tabbed browsing feature and pop-up blocking of the Firefox browser on my Mac, so now I've installed it on this new (to me) office PC. Along with the browser, I'm experimenting with a Google toolbar extension.

The toolbar's "blog this (with Blogger)" item inspired this round of updates to my old Blogger blog. I've also loaded the Sage RSS reader extension and a few trial RSS feeds, including some from the Washington Post. One of them led me to this item about the personal impact of personal blogging: washingtonpost.com: Blog Interrupted...

All in all, this has been a fine way to test the "blog this," RSS, toolbar, Blogger's new editing features, the browser and my new keyboard, all at once. So far so good. But remembering to eat dinner would have been a good idea, too.

WDVX is providing the background music for my new life in Knoxville... but will be doing so very softly until I get some speakers for this new office PC.

Notes about blogging and journalism: Wired interview with Dan Gillmor about his new book

(This really belongs in my other blog, but I have two minutes of battery time left...)

Blog by mail test #3

The first two trials (below) seem to indicate that the e-mail to blog
approach deletes HTML anchor tags. I'll go back and look for online
documentation when I have a chance. I'll also try posting something
from my Handspring TREO e-mail while I'm out.