Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.
I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.
Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
Since the GIMP edits JPEG images superbly but obliterates their IPTC metadata captions, and gThumb, my main image editor of the past three years, outputs horrible resized images in version 3.0.1 in Debian Wheezy, I need a new image editing application.
And did I say that I need it now?
I go through many dozen images a day. Shrinking. Cropping. Recaptioning.
The software needs to work.
Yesterday I set up Wine the non-emulator, whatever-it-is Windows-compatible environment in Linux that enabled me to install and run the IrfanView image editor/viewer.
Not that other choices don't exist. There is the KDE app DigiKam.
And a little searching brought me to an app I always meant to try: Fotoxx.
It's in Debian, so I installed it. After a lengthy indexing of my appointed directories, I dug in and started working on photos.
Quality of resized images is great. It will be even better when I tweak the sharpen settings just right.
I can edit IPTC caption data, and though it's a bit awkward, also the byline field.
I wouldn't call it a speedy app, but so far it is getting the job done. With a little practice, I just might have a new photo-editing app.