Please see the other posts in this series if you are interested in reading more:
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=3490.0 - RSS Reading
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=3491.0 - Flickr Integration
The BasicsBlogging has exploded on the net, with technorati indexing more than 37 million blogs. It seems everyone is jumping on the wagon, and Flock has some tools to make posting to yours a breeze! If you haven't yet got a blog, you can get a free one from either
Wordpress.com or
Blogger.com. If you have a website already, and wish to add a blog - you can get an open-source blog software from
Wordpress.org.
Web Snippets is a feature within
Flock where you can drag-and-drop information you find on the net, for future reference (like to post it to a blog). You can drag text, images, urls etc..
I find it extremely handy, here's a piccy :
Simply dragging text, images or urls down to the bottom of the browser opens this bar, in which you drop the data. It's then stored there for later use - simple but effective!
Now to the main use for this Web Snippets malarkey. The
Blog Editor within Flock has undergone some changes for the Cardinal release, i.e. they have switched engines. The new engine is smoother and quicker than before.
Here is an overview screenshot of the editor:
As you can see - the web snippets bar appears there - with your saved items! All you have to do now is drag and drop them into the editing space and they become part of your blog post. Extremely quick and simple - the entire idea for Flock, in my opinion.
You have your basic formatting tools there too, and I believe you can edit the HTML directly - although I haven't tried this yet. After completing your post, click publish. You then select, in the next window, which blog you wish to post to (you can have numerous blogs configured for use). You can then add tags for services such as
Technorati - and place your post in a catagory. One more button-click and you're done - the blog post is made.
These features of Flock make it really easy to research on the net, and then report about your research on a blog. What would be nice to see is enclosure support (as with the RSS Reader), but I am pretty hopeful that it will be included in a future release.
