Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Windows Live Writer is a pretty good tool for making and updating BLOGs on Blogger.com

After a few weeks struggling with JavaScript rich text editors, I found  Windows Live Writer. It allows me to write my post in windows using familiar tools.

I can view the post

  • normally,
    SNAG-0898
  • in a web layout using the style sheets on the target blog
    SNAG-0899 
  • on as a WWW preview or HTML
    image
  • HTML

I can

  • publish
    SNAG-0901 ,
  • choose my BLOG
    SNAG-0902 
  • Edit or delete an existing post
    SNAG-0903

Excellent

There are two features that I found to be particularly useful:

  • Paste special has a number of paste options
    SNAG-0904
    I use the Thinned HTML method.
    The Writer's built in editor is pretty good for my techo blog but I need the research and lookup features of MS Word for my Creative Writing blog. When I'm ready to publish, I just save the word document as HTML, copy the data from MS Word & paste special into Writer.
  • the Insert Syntax Highlighter is a much safer method of pasting in code snippets without the danger of breaking the HTML on the target page
    SNAG-0905 
    You still have to include styles and script in the Blog's main template. I describe that in my earlier How to highlight code in a blog post. That's just a one off exercise.

There are lots of Plug-ins that are worth exploring.

One negative

I could not install the program without rebooting the PC. It got to 99% and then it just hung.
image Other than that it's been great and I've been far more productive.

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