A while back I published an article on the equipment I used to cover the various press events I go to for TeleRead, Palm Addict and GPSPassion. You can find it here. I thought you might find it interesting to see how I work on the TeleRead site.
I write for the site on a 17" MacBook Pro with a 500GB hard drive. The Pro is also connected to an external mains-powered 1TB hard drive with 2 partitions, one for a Time Machine Backup and another where I keep all my data. In addition to this I use three external USB 500GB drives: two to back up the Pro’s hard drive on alternate days and another to back up the external drive’s data partition every other day. All the USB hard drives are kept in a different room from my Pro. For backup I use SuperDuper, which works like a charm and has saved my rear end several times.
As you can see in the picture, I use a dual monitor setup. The left monitor is the 17" Pro. On that monitor I keep Safari running to view various websites and email. I use Gmail, but I back up my mail by keeping Mac Mail running in the background, downloading all my Gmail to my hard drive.
I post to the site using MarsEdit 2, rather than post directly through WordPress. MarsEdit is a far better editor and gives me more flexibility than the WordPress editor. It has screens for accessing new or past posts, authoring posts and viewing a preview of the post. It also has most of the necessary markup commands. A very nice program.
The right hand screen is a 22" LG. On this screen I keep Twitter running and my RSS reader, as it’s easier to read on a large screen. For a reader I use the pay version of NetNewsWire, which is absolutely first rate. It synchronizes feeds with Google Reader and can cache feeds for several weeks if I need to go back and find something. The number of feeds I pull from is classified, but I generally read through 800 – 1,000 actual feed posts a day, along with posts I get by email from our readers.
That’s it. I always find "behind the scenes" stuff interesting and I hope you do too.
