In case of snow, the website’s down

This morning I awoke to the beautiful sight of a fairly thick dusting of snow across the ground. Being a good commuter, I’m still trying to get in to London. A bit of snow can’t cause problems (although a few strong winds will send the railway in to utter chaotic anarchy). So I decide to visit setrains.co.uk, the website for South Eastern Trains. Not working. That’s helpful.

So I go to the National Rail website, and all it can tell me is that there are delays “in Southern England”. Yeah. I guessed that by looking out the window. Get specific, why don’t you? Like, will my journey be affected?

I don’t have any idea why the National Rail folks haven’t opened up an API. This stuff is begging to be dealt with competently.

Palm text editors

CardTXT is a great text editor. It’s not quite the luxury I’m used to as a SubEthaEdit and Eclipse, but CardTXT is a neat little text editor for the Palm platform. I use it for writing blog posts, dissertations, HTML, XML and Notation3.

SiEd is the alternative to CardTXT, but it doesn’t support Palm widescreen laptop, and you can’t get rid of the keyboard entry panel which makes it a bit of an arse to use with the keyboard. SiEd also hard breaks at the end of lines while CardTXT follows expected behaviour and soft breaks. If you want a hard break, you can push ‘enter’.

Limitations of Blazer

Too bloody cold today. I’m doing the Palm blogging thing. My laptop will be returned to me eventually. I hope it happens before BarCamp.

The Palm platform is okay for blogging, but not great. I can’t find a blogging client that doesn’t suck – they all have some problem. u*blog looks promising but it doesn’t actually work. The other ones have ‘irritationware’ features which put me off buying them. 30 day limit? Fine. Annoying me every time I try to use it – not fine!

m.wordpress.com is okay, but it doesn’t let you edit or delete previous posts. What I really need is the OPML Editor for Palm. Come on Dave, let’s find a Palm programmer and pay him to build an open source OPML Editor.

Test

This is a test of posting to my blog from the m.wordpress server using my Palm TX and an IR keyboard. It’s rather nice to be able to type at something approaching full speed rather than having to use the brain-frazzling Graffiti mode. It’s only taken me a week or so to get to this point…

Foo?
Testing

Foo?

Foo?
Testing

Posting from Flock

This is an example of posting from Flock. It can look really quite cool. Flock enables you to easily post to your blog using your photos and other material found on the web with the Web Snippets functionality. Unfortunately, it's limited to a handful of blog services, very few of which I actually have an account with since I'm an OPML Blogger.

Test

Flapdiddle.

I have an account here just to play with it and to make commenting on wordpress.com easier.

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