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A few miscellaneous items for today.

HTML Editor

Perhaps there is a better way. I’ve started to use two pieces of software to do this blog: Nvu and MarsEdit.

Nvu. My buddy Will Mayall turned me on to this product. I now draft in Nvu. It’s the closest thing I can find to the Holy Grail of editing in WYSIWYG mode and then flipping over to HTML. I especially like four things about it:

  1. You can select text, go to the menu item Insert–>HTML… and put tags around the selection.

  2. In the Source view, it shows tagging in a hierarchical view so that you can see if your HTML arguments are correct.

  3. When you’re creating an ordered or unordered list, you can press Shift Enter and create a following paragraph that is not numbered or bulleted.

    In other words, like this.

  4. If you use smart quotes and apostrophes in the WYSIWYG view, Nvu automatically converts them to the correct HTML code.

The only things it won’t let me do are insert pictures and post entries. It’s not intended as blogger’s tool–but a webmaster’s, so I can live with this because it produces such clean HTML.

MarsEdit. Yes, I know: I can draft in MarsEdit, so I shouldn’t need to use Nvu. Except that with all my ordered and unordered lists, it’s hard (at least as far as I can see) to tag paragraphs that follow an ordered or bulleted paragraph but should not be an ordered or bulleted paragraph. So my procedure is to draft in Nvu, add pictures with MarsEdit, and then post.

Between NetNewsWire and MarsEdit, Ranchero Software is becoming as important as Microsoft to me. And speaking of Microsoft, I tried using Word in Office 2007 running under Parallels. It’s pretty good as a blogging tool that combines editing and posting. Definitely something to try if you’re stuck in the other world.


Wireless News Blog

Just found out about Mobility Today. It’s a very useful blog that covers news in the mobile device market. The reviews are helpful to someone like me who loses a phone every three months or so. 


The Art of Moderating

This is a good posting about moderating a panel by Jerry Weissman. Jerry gets big buck$ for training CEOs for IPO roadshows. Moderating a panel seems to be a popular topic because here’s another one on the same topic by Paul Kedrosky. In case you missed it, here’s my version.