Downloaded Windows Live Mail

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the virtual zone, Microsoft gets rid of Outlook Express and replaces it with a monstrous agent. One that takes care of all your virtual activities -- even blogging. I forgot that I had a blog on Live Spaces or whatever the heck it's call but MS reminded me and even gave me some software to update it.

Will I continue to update it? That's always the question because I can't depend on MS to remind me -- or maybe I can. I haven't found the function yet. But what I did find with Live Mail is:

A new email client - one that allows Mail Rules and also lets me receive from my GMail account.

This blogging software - which, depending on how this goes, will let me easily update my blog.

A photo thingy - which I have very little use for but is probably functional.

A new version of messenger - I never use messenger anyway so who cares.

If you wanted to download Live Mail and reap the "benefits" as I am right now. Just look for the link in the email that Microsoft sent me. I have it right here:

Dear Microsoft Outlook Express customer,

You may have received an e-mail from us letting you know 
that Microsoft is planning to retire the DAV protocol that 
Outlook Express uses to access Windows Live Hotmail. In 
response to customer feedback requesting more time to evaluate 
alternative solutions, we have decided to postpone retiring 
DAV and we are investigating other alternatives for accessing 
Windows Live Hotmail via Outlook Express. This means that if 
you use Outlook Express to access your Windows Live Hotmail 
account, you will continue to be able to do so beyond the 
previously announced June 30 transition deadline. We will be 
sure to update you once we have additional plans to share and 
early enough in advance to help ensure a smooth transition in 
the future. 
Additionally, Outlook Express customers that use Windows Vista 
or Windows XP are always welcome to download and use our next 
generation free email client, Windows Live Mail, providing the 
familiarity of Outlook Express and much more. You can download 
the new client at http://get.live.com/wlmail/overview.

We appreciate your feedback, and encourage you to continue to 
provide it.

Sincerely,
Windows Live Mail Team
 

Blogging

I've only been blogging for a short period of time so I have a limited perspective on it. But I thought I would share with you what I have learned so far about weblogs.

First you've got to decide where you are going to blog. To me, this was the most critical decision. There are plenty of places to blog out there: Blogger, Word Press, Windows Live, and Freewebs - to name a few. There is even an adult one called Thumblogger.

Plus there are a couple of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Plurk, or Jaiku. They're fine if you are wanting to communicate and you don't have lots to say, but we are talking about longer blogs here.

In doing a page oriented blog, it is important that you have some log writing software. Many people use Word Press - I think this is mostly the Mac contingent. I use Windows Live Writer. It came with Windows Live, it was free and it seems full featured. Again, like your blogging host, there are a number of different programs to choose from and most of them are free.

If you don't have Blog software, you can use the online page that most blog hosts have for your blog. This is usually clunky to use and allows a serious error to occur. One time while using one of these pages, I wrote my whole entry and wanted to search for some additional information. I navigated away from the page and lost everything I had written.

Blog software, like Live Writer, makes publishing your blog easy. Besides doing WSYWYG markup, they allow you to upload the content and some even allow you to upload pictures. And not just to host sites associated with the software - anywhere.

Well almost anywhere, your host site needs to support one of the many protocols available to your blogging software. Freewebs didn't, that is why I stopped blogging there. That and it seemed to have a problem with some external images.

I was going to use Windows Live as my blogging site. But you only seem to get one blog per Windows Live account. So after looking around a bit, I choose blogger. Mostly because they were there, they specialise in blogs and I liked the look of their templates. I don't want to be spending a huge amount of time customising the site, I just want to write words.

A lot of people chose Word Press. Again, I think this is because they are Mac users but there probably are other reasons.

The last thing you need with a blog is decide on you content. I'm a pretty eclectic person so I wanted to write about everything. But I'm learning quickly that you can't do that. People have to take an interest in the subject matter of your blog in order for it to get read. This is what we are trying to achieve, isn't it? To have our blog read.

So pick a subject and stick to it - or do like I did and start a number of blogs, one for each subject you like to blog about. Before you know it you'll have more posts than you expect.