So this afternoon Matt and I were talking about our Outback trip. The subject of logging came up. The best trip logs are written as close to the action as possible. The longer you wait, thinking "oh, I'll write this up when I get back" or "I'll glue together all these weird newspaper clippings once we fly home", the less likely you are to do it, and the more likely you are to forget interesting micro-details that make this sort of thing interesting in the first place.
With that in mind, I said it would be nice if we all were able to do logging directly on the laptop we'll bring along, and then eventually dump it to the Blog. My only idea was some half-baked "make a local copy of MoveableType on the PC and use that."
Sounded like a lot of ugliness for not much gain. Occam's solution was emacs. Just to have everybody write up text files and later convert those into blog entries.
But Serendipity struck! I checked the sixapart website to find out what's new with MoveableType. Lo and hehold, it talked about this program Zempt, which allows you to write blog entries from a windows client, offline. Then it syncs everything up for you.
This is exactly what we want!
This blog entry is actually being written with Zempt. It bootstrapped itself together quite nicely and took almost no configuration. I'll play around with it somemore and see how well it works. It did complain that I was using an old version of MoveableType (not version 2.6) Maybe I'll upgrade. I don't think the upgrade has anything particularly wonderful -- some more powerful, abstract notion of filters, but that is about it.