I am getting into this blogging thing....

In fact, consider this my replacement for all the FPS games I gave up a couple years back because they were just too addictive for me. (I did jump back into the fray for Halo 2 but I avoided XBox live with it.....I would have fallen in and never returned...)

I am one of those people you know that has some goofball idea or lopsided opinion about something almost ALL of the time. I am also one of those people that has an idea or a thought, I expend a lot of mental energy fleshing it out, I make a feeble effort to remember what it all is, and then I promptly forget it (I grew up in the 70's.....what can I say...) My Pocket PC has been a god-send because it allows me to jot a quick note or type up the details and now I get to forget about it only to stumble on it later.

I have been taking some of those notes and converting them to blogs for the past couple weeks.

But have you ever had one of those moments where an idea or thought hits you that is so amazing (to you)....so astounding (to you)....so utterly stupendous (to you) that you felt you had to tell someone, right then, that moment, or else the thought would be lost in time and lose it's impact if even a single minute were to pass?

That is me all of the time....

My Pocket PC is nice enough to have WiFi and GPRS as well as Bluetooth. In short, I can be connected to the Internet (and my blog) all the time if I want. In my hands I have the perfect outlet for my ravings.

But, as anyone with a Pocket PC will tell you, browsing the web, even with the decent sized screen on an iPaq, leaves something to be desired if the site is not mobile device aware.

My Pocket PC has a browser.....can I blog with it? Sure..... as long as I don't mind spending half my time scrolling all over the screen to check formating and trying to find the damn "submit" button. It reminds me of the early web days when many people still had small monitors with a max (readable) resolution of 800x600 and you would hit a site formatted for 1024x768.

Beyond !@#*ing annoying.

So I set out on a hunt this afternoon to find a PPC based blogging app that I could actually use. The search literally took about 1 second. I went to http://search.msn.com, used "Pocket PC Blogging" as my query and 1 second later, hit number 1 was for the tool I am using right now to write this post.

Kevin Daly is the coder and has written a nice PPC blogging application called "Diarist". What caught my eye, and the reason I downloaded the first tool I hit, is the tool supports Community Server Web Posting as well as it's MetaBlog API which is what I use on my site.

The tool comes in two versions (I am using 1.1) and each version has an .MSI install version and a .CAB install (I grabbed the .MSI). It installed perfectly to my iPaq 6315 to the default directory. I am going to play around later with installing it to my storage card.

It has a very simple interface (nice!) and an easy to use lay out. It supports hyperlinking, basic text markup and assigning multiple categories to a single posting which *I* find invaluable. It even allows you to link to a picture.....I just didn't have one handy. If I had one suggestion to offer it would be to allow the categories windows to be static once opened so I could pick multiple categories without having to re-open the window. Hardly a show stopper.

Make that two suggestions - I was going to take a break from writing this post but couldn't find an obvious method of saving what I have written so far just in case something flakes out. Cut and paste to a text doc kept me from worrying but it would be nice to be able to save it through the app for later editing.

I think one of the best features of the app is the support for a fairly wide range of blog site providers. I intentionally ignored blogging matters for years. Over time I picked up the names of the popular providers and many are listed in the configuration setup. If *I* have heard of them then the TRUE bloggers certainly have heard of them.

The number one best feature of the app - it just works. Very little config, not a lot of setup involved, and seemingly little footprint on my PPC.

I should mention that on Kevin's site he states very plainly to read the README.TXT file that comes with the app. I second that motion. I am your typical "just get in the car, screw the map" kind of guy. I was initially stumped when comparing the Diarist setup to my BlogJet configuration and that didn't get me connected to my server. A quick glance at the README took care of that and I was up and running within 15 minutes of download (1 minute of reading the README...)

To be fair, this is the ONLY PPC based blogging app I have downloaded so far. No doubt there are others. I will probably spend some time this weekend looking for a few others to test. But this one hit the mark out of the gate and set a pretty high bar.

Rockin...

Cheers!

<clicking Post.....NOW!>