Playing with Blog Entry Poster for GNOME

About two weeks ago I upgraded my purchased SUSE 9.3 Professional system to OpenSUSE/SUSE 10.0.

First of all, huge props to Novell/SUSE for turning their distro into a community-supported project. Having known Novell since my dad used their network in his office back in the '80s, it's great to see them restoring their former glory via the Open Source game. And SUSE being the first distro I purchased and actually got working on one of my own PCs (back in '99) I feel confident that this move will take what was a strong distro and make it stronger. Sure, Red Hat blazed the Corporate-cum-Community trail with their release of Fedora Core, but SUSE's not only stepped up but come up strong.

Case in point. I type this post on my OpenSUSE upgraded HP Pavillion dv4150 laptop(!!!) and will be posting it via the Wireless G connex I'm using here at boloco's inspired burritos (pretty damn inspiring, I might add). The upgrade was ridiculously easy. Far better than when I upgraded my roomies older HP and my sister's Dell with WinXP. Yisch!!! Terrible memories.

Anyhow, since the upgrade, I've been playing with different tools that came with the distribution. Having generally stuck to my workhorse tools (OpenOffice, Mozilla, Kaffiene, Thunderbird...) I've gotten more and more interested in pushing the system and software to its limits.

Which brings me to this Blog Entry Poster tool. I found it in the Applications > System > Configuration > Desktop Applet menu. Kind of a wierd spot for it, especially since I didn't see a second icon for it under the Internet or Office menus. It was about as hard to pinpoint on the web as it was (would have been) to find it on the desktop (had I actually been looking for it). But now that I've found it, it's a gem that I'll be keeping close going forward.

Setup was stupid easy. Select your Blog Site from the drop down list. Enter your blog account ID and Password. Hit the Lookup Blogs button and it pulls up a list of your blogs from the given account. Hit Close (wish it had the usual OK and Cancel buttons - but that's minor) and the Post Blog Entry screen pops up. Type as you would with any word processor and when you're done click Post Entry. After that, your ramblings are up for everyone to see!

I'm damn impressed. From my Googling, it looks like SUSE and Ubuntu Gnome install with the tool. If your distro doesn't have it, just go to:

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/gnome-blog/

and click Download in the upper right.

I'm diggin' it. The AFroNaut will definitely Bloggeth much more often. Check it out and enjoy!