Let’s go back to July 4th.  I posted using the WordPress iPhone app right from my phone just after watching a fireworks display.  Shortly there after, the Wordpress application stopped connecting to my blog… needless to say I was unhappy.  I did all of the usual trouble shooting… checked my blog, checked the app, reinstalled the app, and then I went to the developers website (automattic itself), and low and behold a number of folks were having the same issue… so many in fact that right now on their main page are this post, and this one. So, I did what any good techie would, I tested a different app to see if it would connect. While I was sitting in the oil change shop, I downloaded Blogpress for the iPhone. and Viola! I have aconnection to my blog again… (and I can post multiple pictures to boot!)

So, I was off blogging again… until last week Saturday… then BlogPress stopped connecting to my blog.  I checked their forums, and found a couple of references to connection issues, but no real fixes.  I was tempted to download another iPhone blogging application (iBlogger $9.99), but I was concerned that I would have the same issue… I even began thinking that it might be edublogs.org itself. So I started doing a bit of investigation that way…

Running through edublogs.org support site, I got no returns from queries there… Then I checked the forums and the last post referencing mobile blogging was 8 months ago, with “coming soon we are working on making that better” as the result. So, I created a new discussion with my specific issue, and within a few hours Sue Waters replied that edublogs.org needed to turn off XMLRPC access because of stability issues… I am not sure what that means, however, right now, I cannot get to edublogs, so I am getting concerned.

Update: edublogs was going through an update which provided a new dashboard… that is why the service was up and down while I was creating this post.  (yet another reason I use a blogging client and do NOT prefer to post directly online.) Still not XMLPRC support… and therefore no mobile blogging…

Well if I am going to live in the cloud, I can’t really use my favorite publishing tool Windows Live Writer can I?  So, in keeping with my “cloud initiative” I am looking to potentially use Zoho Writer to directly post to this blog.  Additionally, this is a nice test for Zoho Writer’s capabilities. 

Well, the first issue I had was setting up my blog, I was missing the xml.rpc piece to the blog url… Didn’t know it needed to be there, but this was easily corrected by looking at the FAQ’s for writer… My second issue was trying to get the picture you see above and to the left into this post.  Although the image dialogue box says that you can enter a url for an online photo… the dialogue would NOT let me type or copy and paste the url… when clicking in the filename/url box it would open my My Pictures folder… for me more interestingly, when I put the url in my WIndows File dialogue (like I was going to upload a fiel from my hard drive, Vistas nicely found the file in my temp browser folder, and I was able to select it that way. Hopefully it will upload.  We’ll see in a minute.

Do you know how much Google knows about how to search?

So, I believe that I am pretty good at Internet based searches… I’d feel confident saying that I am quite good at finding material, information, locations, data, etc. through a web search.  I know to narrow and expand the search, I know to look for synonyms, break things down into their component parts, come up with similar concepts, use site specific searches, search by key words or tag words, use other resources like technorati and delicious and search engines… look at visual search tools like kartoo to look for linkages… even with all of that I was amazed by what I saw on this video. 

Patrick Norton, formerly of ZDTV/G4 and DL.tv, interviewed Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, about some of the advanced search techniques (limiters – definers) that are capable in Google’s search engine, and frankly I was amazed at all of the cool things that I did not know Google could do…

Want to find “things” that are between two numbers? Say you were looking for the coolest hotel room in Cancun, but you were on a limited budget and only wanted to see rooms that would cost between $50 and $75 per night… How long would that take you?  What about knowing the depth of the San Andreas Fault… could you find that without needing to read 5 sites on the San Andreas? Want to know how many Euros 600 Yen would be? Need to track a package or know where a flight is? Google can do all of this but probably MUCH more easily than you think.  Check out this video:

A special thanks goes out to the Jeff Utecht the Educational Liaison at WetPaint for the message regarding this video!