Jill Hammonds EdBlog

Recently I purchased one of those lovely little HP 2133 computers (netbook, mini-note type thing – 160 GB hardrive and 2Gb RAM) that are so light and portable to use when on my overseas travel.  I love the portability, but of course being a Mac user most of the time, I knew I was going to miss being able to prepare my blog offline each evening in iWeb, and to then upload each time I had access to the internet.  Experience told me though that there had to be a piece of software for PCs that could do the same thing, and so a Google search soon yielded “Blogdesk” and a few minutes later it was downloaded to my computer and ready to roll.

Joy in using this system while travelling the USA and UK for a month made me think about how useful this software would be for classroom teachers so that students could prepare their blog offline, teachers could do the quality control check if need be later in the day, and it could then be published to the internet with a click of a button.  As my Mobile Me account is due to expire shortly, I also decided to create a new blog site and did this through http://wordpress.com as this interfaces so easily with Blogdesk.

My travel blog is largely a vehicle for sharing the wonderful photos I so love to take, and Blogdesk handles these seamlessly for me – click on the picture icon, locate the file and click OK.  The software lets you know the picture is too big and gives you a choice of sizes and within seconds has done all the resizing for great presentation and very fast loading.  I haven’t fiddled with the sidebars or customised the look – no time for that on an overseas trip, but check out my blog if you like to see how great it can be.  I added short commentary and loads of photos each evening and still had time to play and sleep.  http://jillhammondsnz.wordpress.com

So, if you have shied away from a class blog because of the need to work online, or if you want a simple system to ease management of blogging, the software can be downloaded from http://blogdesk.com and if you set up a blog at http://wordpress.com then the interfacing will be a really simple process – just File -> Manage blog and follow the simple instructions.

Good luck and look forward to seeing the blogs appear.

And now I can breathe a sigh of relief for another year LOL.