Best Hubris

Sometimes as I go through my day, I stumble across things that seem so OBVIOUS to me that I have trouble understanding why it is even an issue.

Today’s version comes courtesy of every single email client I use, which includes most of the big names, and a couple of the small names.  Now, every one of these clients includes an option to not display the images in an email by default.  I applaud this and I think it is a great idea.  It save me tons of time and bandwidth to not open images in a message that it turns out I have not interest in, so mission accomplished.  Kudos to all developers on this score.

The giant whole in the system though is a way to have email from certain senders be opened with the images automatically downloading.  For example, I get email from Borders rewards which often includes a coupon that I might like to use, so I always end up clicking the Download Images button or link. 

That’s Not What an Address Book Is For

Now, I can add the automated please-dont-reply Borders email address to my address book in order to have the images open automatically, but that is about the dumbest thing I have ever heard.  I have hundreds of names in my address book already.  Yes, I can search it, but sometimes it seems faster to click the letter and then scroll.  If I start adding Borders and others, that address book size will just get bigger.

Let’s break this down.  The address book is for storing the contact information of people I might want to get in touch with.  In other words, for people I want to send email TO.  It is not the place to manage my whitelist for RECEIVING email!  Is it really that hard to add a “Always Open Images From This Sender” option?  How about a "Respected Sender” or “Trusted Sender” list with the ability to select varying degrees of trust: “Allow Images”, “Allow HTML” and so on.  Has no one else thought of this?  Is this a feature that everyone would love to have, but no developer knows people want it?

It bothers me enough, I’m seriously wondering if I should learn how to hack enough code to add it on my own to one of the emails that lets me do it.  After I have 27 bajillion downloads of my plugin, maybe they’ll add it as a standard feature.  Once one of them does it, the masses will clamor at the others until they add it, and then the problem will go away.

In the mean time, if you would like to beat me to it by adding it to your product, or writing the code for the add-on, I hereby grant you license to my idea in exchange for the price of letting me know about it so I can fix this nagging problem and go on about the already substantial task of managing all of my email and contacts.

Ok, now that I’m running several websites:

www.financegourmet.com

www.arcticllama.com

www.undefeateddaddy.com

with more on the way, I need good blogging software. By good I mean I need it to do more than just be a text editor with a publish button. This theme I’m using uses the “custom fields” so ideally the blogging software I find would handle those. Oh, and it can’t do what that piece of crap from Microsoft does by randomly naming my images that I carefully choose file names for to whatever it wants when I upload. What the heck is up with that? Does Microsoft intentionally try to make their products useless to power users? The terrible implementation of CSS in IE STILL has us coding bizarre workarounds for it. Now Windows Live Writer comes with an undocumented random image name generator. When you publish your blog posting Live Writer takes the file name that you gave your image file and adds a bunch of junk to it, because it knows that what you really want is a file named “winodwslivewriter-articletitle-yourfilename”

Yea! Just what nobody on the whole planet wanted! If I named the file guy-on-a-bench.jpg it was because I wanted the file to be named guy-on-a-bench.jpg. No doubt this stupid idea is someone’s idea of “branding”. Jerks. Well, there goes the uninstall program. You guys are morons once again. Good thing you have that monopoly because man, are you incompetent.

software, blogging, blog, Microsoft, Wordpress

Technorati Tags: software, blogging, blog, Microsoft, Wordpress

Indeed, the BlogDesk program has three nice little tabs across the top of the area you type in your post to make your “more” and “excerpt”. I will have to say I very much prefer the MORE button in Live Writer. I allows you to come back after the fact and pick your more spot without any cutting and pasting. But, the Excerpt piece is there. On the other hand it looks like I have to go into the Wordpress admin interface anyway to set the “custom” value that lets my feature post image show up. I wonder if any of the offline tools have that functionality in them?

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for my blogging.  Never did a big assessment or anything, I just kind of ended up with it. Now, I’m wondering if there is something better. This theme uses the “excerpt” field otherwise it just keeps the first x number of characters as the excerpt. I don’t see where to do the excerpt in Live Writer. I’ll check the help files, but I seem to remember being able to do something like that with BlogDesk.

Keep plugging away.