I have been up all night. For some reason I could not sleep with a lot on the mind and so rather than fight it I did some reading. In one article I may have what is for me the holy grail of all blog function finds.
Yep, that big.
Julio Ojeda-Zapata is a technology writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He also writes Your Tech Weblog and I have found quite a few gadgets and tricks over the past year plus from his stories and blog posts.
A few days ago he wrote Blogger-friendly Windows Live Writer impresses. He does a review of Windows Live Writer and WinJournal. Julio notes that both have local connections. Windows Live Writer with chief architect J.J. Allaire and WinJournal produced by the local group Mariner Software.
Because I trust Julio both as a guy who gives fair reviews and because he has used Windows Live Writer on his blog I am giving it a try right now as I type this.
So far so good. It's like typing on my blog. Right font, color easy to do web links. Put the cursor over a linked word and it turns gold. Right on!!!
Spell check picked up a word here and there. My big issue though is grammar check.
Previously I would write in Microsoft Word, cut and paste into the TypePad editor. That was when I was using Word 2000. For those reading my RSS Feed in recent weeks you have seen the frequent miscolored (spell check says the previous is not a word but I am rolling with it anyway) word and particularly web links.
That is when I started using Word 2003. For some reason it does not cut and paste like the older version.
This part right here I did write in Word to see how it translates. If this works I will be the happiest sleep deprived blogger you have ever seen.
Woo Hoo!!! It worked.
Mr. Allaire, thank you so much for creating this baby. Julio, thanks for the review and keep on doing what you do.
Check out Julio's review as he talks about the cool new features. As Julio notes WinJournal is not available in TypePad so I have no idea how it works. Frankly, I am so happy with what I am seeing I am not sure it would matter.
This was easy to set up. I think it took about 45 seconds and two mouse clicks.
So here goes, drum roll please... PUBLISH
Oh hell, I am trying to find where I add a category and clicked on tabs at the top. I clicked "New" as it looks like a drop down menu. WRONG. But made a setting switch to save the draft every 1 minute.
Whew, that saved me 15 or so minutes.
Found it, click "Properties" where you will find your categories. And oh hey, there is the split screen too for those of us long winded blogging types. Key words and Technorati tags too.
I know some of this is lack of sleep but this is awesome.
OK... PUBLISH
When I started bloging, someone told me about how she used to be able to write posts with full formating in Word, and simply copy and paste into Typepad. That stopped working for her, but she didn't know why; I wonder if she experienced the same thing you did with the Word upgrade.
I write my posts in Word, and save as a .txt file. I open that in Notepad, select all, copy and paste into the Typepad editor. Then I insert bold, italics, etc to text, insert images, and so on. Final edits are done in the Typepad editor -- which is where most of the errors happen!
Posted by: Ted | June 06, 2007 at 10:03 AM