{"id":17355,"date":"2012-08-20T08:47:34","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T00:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=17355"},"modified":"2026-04-03T13:19:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T05:19:33","slug":"blog-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2012\/08\/20\/blog-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Interestingly, over the years while we&#8217;ve had many friends who&#8217;ve tried blogging, not many keep up with posting after a while. I think a good part of it is that blogging in itself isn&#8217;t convenient, relative to social network sites like Facebook or Google+ anyway now. It&#8217;s a lot easier to post up microbits of reflections and notes that you can share, as opposed to logging into your blog provider site and writing up a new post, or in my case &#8211; a Blog Writer &#8211; to write something more substantial than a sentence or two.<\/p>\n<p>Our domain here is about 12 years old now, and we&#8217;ve been blogging regularly since 2006 &#8211; somewhere in my last year of my research when I was done with my thesis and packing to return back to Singapore. At times, I&#8217;m sure even Ling would have wondered why we&#8217;re still posting so much, especially when it&#8217;s so out of fashion these days, and our reading audience comprises maybe about a dozen close friends and fellow parents of young children! Moreover, the sort of work that the both of us do in real-life presents implicit expectations of our public behavior, including what we do online &#8211; which sort of means the only safe things I can write about is entertainment, technology, photography and children.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s funny too to note that Ling still uses the somewhat clunky WordPress front-end to write her blogs. Usually she&#8217;ll write her post and put up her pictures, and then tell me it&#8217;s ready for posting whereupon I&#8217;ll look through her post, clean up any formatting issues and check her tags before posting or scheduling it up for her. For myself, I&#8217;ve posted here about blog writing software that I use; namely <a href=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/03\/01\/windows-utilities-ii\/\">Windows Live Writer<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The program though doesn&#8217;t work very well with the super-high display resolution on the new MacBook Pro. Basically, the program lacks a zoom feature (e.g. similar to what you see on word processors). After some searching and trying out of alternatives, I found a nifty add-on\/plug-in\/extension that&#8217;s supported by all the four major browsers (Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera): it&#8217;s ScribeFire. Unlike Live Writer, ScribeFire doesn&#8217;t run as a separate program but as a tab in your browser. The program isn&#8217;t as full-featured as Live Writer (e.g. direct insertion of images into the Editor doesn&#8217;t work very well on Firefox), but otherwise works well enough and works in offline mode too.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_17358\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-17358\" style=\"width: 550px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-17358\" title=\"blog-writing\" src=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/blog-writing.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"347\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/blog-writing.gif 550w, https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/blog-writing-300x189.gif 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-17358\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Blog writing using ScribeFire<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Interestingly, over the years while we&#8217;ve had many friends who&#8217;ve tried blogging, not many keep up with posting after a while. I think a good part of it is that blogging in itself isn&#8217;t convenient, relative to social network sites<\/p>\n<div class=\"entry-read-more\"><a class=\"read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2012\/08\/20\/blog-writing\/\">Read More<span class=\"cleanwp-sr-only\">  Blog Writing<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,644,16,645],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-at-home","category-everything-else","category-toys-technology","category-wordpress","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-644-id","wpcat-16-id","wpcat-645-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/blog-writing.gif","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38592,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17355\/revisions\/38592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}