Alternative to offline blogging

Maricris Nonato -

I found a  temporary alternative to offline blogging.  For the past few days, I've been doing my posts online, using I.PH's publishing tool.  Though I knew that I.PH provides us with an email blogging facility (which I've been using long before when I was still perceptions.i.ph), I wasn't very much into using it for the mere fact that I enjoy Version 2's interface.

When I had lost a beautiful post, I thought about offline blogging.  Just earlier, Power of Firefox Bookmarking was posted using my GMail account.  While I was typing away, I thought that this could be a substitute for offline blogging since, your work is being saved by GMail's autosaving of drafts.  I loved it!  But then, (my apologies to those who are subscribed using my RSS feeds), the posted message was nothing like how it was created in my GMail compose window.  Thing is, the message was converted to unicode, plain text.  Hmm.. Dunno why really.. but here's an alternative to that..

1.  Type in your blog post in your GMail compose window.
2.  You can type your blog title in the subject field, if you want to, but its not required.  This is just to ensure that you won't miss the title itself during GMail's autosaving.
3.  If you need images, my recommendation, is to use external linking.  Too bad, multiply puts such a big watermak in the images themselves that I had to resize screencaps for my images to be more efficient.  Upload your external images somewhere like (Flickr, PicasaWeb, Ringo, PhotoBucket, etc).  Just make sure that you know how to get the image url of your uploaded photo.  If, however, you'd want to put all the photos in your I.PH photo section, of course you can do so.
4.  Now copy the whole article from inside your GMail compose window, and create a new post in your I.PH blog, then paste it there.
5.  From there, I know you know what to do.  You can put in the external images by using the HTML format of your post (if you know how to do this). Or, you can use your I.PH photo section if you uploaded it there.

Hope this will benefit some.. coz for me it definitely works!  I don't have to have an offline blogging tool that I need to install just to save my articles.  And, after all, I can just save drafts of my posts in my GMail before I'm ready to publish it.  Yey!!!