Test Post with Blogsy.

After 15 years of talking about it, our family is finally travelling to Thailand next month. I can't figure out how Heather and I managed to go there on our honeymoon. The way I remember it, we just bought two tickets and jumped on a plane a couple of days after the wedding. There was no other preparation or planning and even when we landed in-country, we didn't know where we were going. I wandered into the back of the train station office and asked the administrators for advice on where we should go. I settled on one of their suggestions and went back to the front of the office where I bought the tickets that would take us to within a ferry ride of Koh Samui. Koh means "island" and is not pronounced with a K but rather a G sound. With its glottal stop, the word sounds exactly like if you were saying the word "got", but cut the word short before pronouncing the T. The confusion in the english spelling comes from the fact that the corresponding Thai consenents have different sounds depending on whether they appear at the start or at the end of a word. Just like the ubiquitous noodle dish, Pad Thai, is actually pronounced "putt Thai" (like a golf putt). Anyways, the two weeks we spent on Samui were so wonderful, we continue to draw on those memories and those experiences 15 years later.

This trip is shaping up to be very different from that carefree adventure. First off, we have gotten immunizations for hepatitis, typhoid fever, and rabies and have an appointment to get everyone a prescription for malaria. And I am still worried about possible illnesses. When I was on my mission I contracted dange fever and was hospitalized for two weeks. If Heather or the kids caught dange fever, it would ruin our vacation. And if I caught it a second time it can be much more serious, resulting in internal bleeding. Instead of winging it, I have booked all of our accommodations in advance - and not easily either, owing to the fact that there are six of us. I have also been pouring over the best way to carry money, something that we didn't need very much of last time, but that we don't seem to have enough of this time. Amongst all of this planning, I was also trying to come up with a way to post on our blog and preserve as many memories as possible. We will be travelling light so I wanted to use our ipad to compose the posts and upload them whenever we find ouselves with wifi. My searches led me to the app Blogsy which is reported to be the current best solution to blogging on the ipad.

It was a $5.75 purchase at the App Store but I thought it would be worth it if it allowed me to easily insert and resize photos, something that the free Blogger app did not do. So far I am impressed with what I see. The above photo is a test of the sort of work flow I anticipate. I snapped a photo of my breakfast of avacado/tomato/ham eggs benedict on homemade focaccia bread and then transferred the photo wirelessly from my camera to the ipad. I then opened Blogsy, hit the "+" icon for a new post, and started typing. I tapped on the icon to insert a photo from my library and dragged the picture to where I wanted it in my post. There was some confusion initially becuase I got a "Problem" message telling me that the photo I was trying to use was copywrited, or that my blog was set to private, or that I was offline.

I was worried that I would have to confess to Heather that I'd just wasted $5 - this in the same week that I paid the vet to check Orco for strange sores in his arm(leg)pit, and found out that it was just acne and that our stupid dog is now a teenager. Anyways, I figured out that the real cause of the problem is that I was trying to import the photo from my Photo Stream which involves the cloud and some complications that I don't really understand, when I should have been dragging it from the Camera Roll. That aside, the process was easy and relatively quick, and double tapping the photo brings up the Image Settings dialogue, which allowed me to adjust the size with a slider. In this process I am not cropping or editing any of my photos and I dont want to use another app to edit because that will just slow things down even more. Fortunately, Olympus jpegs are so lovely that I have no reservation using them straight out of camera (ooc).

Here's a photo I copied from the Internet and posted at 85% of its original size. Hopefully it will show as a smaller photo in the post, but show full size when clicked on. It also shows what I should have done with our money instead of a trip to Thailand (Honda Valkyrie if you are interested).

Up to this point, I have done all of my work offline. I will now post it to the Internet and check to see how the spacing and photos turned out. While I'm doing that, here a picture taken with the ipad's built in camera:

And I am also going to experiment with the alignment on this one.
Deacon took this photo while we were driving somewhere.
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Ok, I am pleased with how that all worked out. The spacing of the text next to Deacon's photo was a little weird, but I usually centre my photos so it won't be a problem. I think this program is going to work great for our needs and I have encountered only two real problems:

1. If I accidentally hit the emoticon button on the keyboard (easy to do because it is right next to the shift key), it evidently causes a rift in the space/time continuum and a Blogsy "emojis not allowed" dialogue box pops up and can't be dismissed without closing the app and restarting.

2. For some reason, using the ipad to blog makes me more long winded and rambling. Sorry about that.

- C