Blogging from Microsoft Word 2007
by Volker Weber
Word is a great tool for writing stuff, right? Blogging is all about communicating with words (and pictures, too). So, why not use Word to write your blog posts?
Before you jump to the comments section, read the whole post. I like the idea.
Comments
I like the idea, too, and it looks like they did a good job. Let's implement it in OpenOffice. =)
Actually it seems to be a great idea to use familiar applications for similar tasks. Why not writing your blog articles with a wordprocessor?
on the rare occasion I'm saying something detailed or important on mine, I use a word processor first, then copy the text over.
This is both a good and rather obvious idea. If more non-geeks blogged, the use of such a function would have been apparent earlier, I think (hen-egg-problem). Still, I've seen quite a few people by now who write their texts in Word and then copypaste them into their blogging tool.
Personally, I write most of my longer postings in Textpad, as this is the app I live in. What follows is the tedious procedure of copypasting into the rather basic MT form and waiting for the rebuild and pinging procedures to finish.
That's why I'd like to have a "drop zone" on my desktop into which I can drop a let's say Markdown formatted chunk of text which then gets published to my blog in the background without further ado. This app would have threading so the next piece could be dropped while the publishing procedure of the prior one hasn't finished yet. I detailed this idea a longer while ago in a blog posting draft which I've never published - because at the time of writing, who might have guessed it, I was fed up by my blogging tool's user interface.
@Haiko - I've had the same thought. Wouldn't it be great to take anything in your clipboard and just "drop" it somewhere -- maybe a system tray icon or an OSX or KDE equivilant -- and have it create a new entry on your blog?
Its one of those back of my mind things that one day I'll get around to building if nobody beats me to it.
Yes.
This is one of those rare occasions when someone in MS is actually ahead of the game. I compose all my blog posts in raw HTML. I do this because it is the only way I can be sure that what you see is what I meant (WYSIWIM). It would be nice if an authoring app (MS Word, or anything else) could do that...
If this is a good idea, then let's take the next step and begin using XHTML + CSS for document interchange.
So is the innovation that a button uses some API to automatically publish to a blog system or that Word html output now promises to become something that deserves to be called html?
I like the idea too but I am not so forgiving on the fact that the worlds most used word processing engine is producing garbage whenever you need something else than .doc (although the xml output in 2003 is usable).
It seams that I'm the only one that doesn't like the idea of using word for blogging.
I don't want to wait 30 seconds until word ist started just to type a smal comment in my blog.
I prefere special smal easy to use apps for special tasks rather than on big big big complicated complex app for doing everything.
It also doesn't seam natural for me to user a word processing app for blogging. It is natural to have a blogging interface in my newsreader. It is natural to have a blogging interface in my browser. But I doesn't need it in word (or OpenOffice).
Wolfgang, you don't have to. But there are lots of people who write all their texts in Microsoft Word. Shopblogger is one of them. They want to do everything with the application they know how to use. Case in point: Notes users who like the product want to do everything in Notes, even if the problem does not lend itself to this solution.
Andrew, I just looked at the html code on your site. Current top posting shows:
<h2>Finally, a great IBM ad on TV -- sponsoring Dr. Who no less! </h2></span><font color="#0000FF" face="Courier New"> </font><br> <font color="#2F2F2F">Imagine my surprise at finding IBM commercial on television that (a) was very good, (b) was very well placed, and (c) mentioned collaboration! </font><br><br><font color="#2F2F2F">Of all places,
Which word processor creates this mess?
I like the whole conept of the new Office. The ribbon seems to be a great innovation - a real innovation in the world of Office software. And this by Microsoft. What was the last time, they really innovated and didnt't copy or just improve slightly?
Ok, maybe there's something like the ribbon I just don't know. In that case I'd take all back
I'll keep blogging directly from Lotus Notes ;-) (predictable, I know!)
