Aug
12
I had read a couple of articles about Windows Live Writer during the week, so this morning I thought I would try it out. This post was written with Live Writer; and unlike other similar tools I’ve tried, I didn’t have to go back into the WordPress editor and tweak the results because they didn’t look right after the article posted. As far as I’m concerned, that alone is H-U-G-E!
I’ve just started exploring Live Writer’s functions, so may write a little more about it in future articles. One thing I noticed that I already like a lot is that you can click a check box when inserting a hyperlink and the program automatically adds ‘target=”_blank”‘ to the link so that it opens a new tab or window when clicked. I’ve been trying to follow a rule of my own when I add links, especially to blogs: I link to blog home pages so they open in a new window, and blog articles so they open in the current window. I noticed that that’s how I often read and follow articles, so I thought it would be a good practice. I usually end out going back through the draft of a post and adding ‘target=”_blank”‘ to a bunch of the links so this is a real time-saver for me.
You can download the Windows Live Writer Beta here, and there’s a blog here. Since it’s a local install, you would of course need to install it on any computer you plan to blog from (I wonder if there is, or if they’re planning, a web version). A local install works for me, though, since I do most of my writing on a couple of computers at home, especially articles with lots of links, pictures, special formatting, or whatever. I also can already see that I’m a whole lot less likely to get lost and confused when bouncing among multiple browser windows and working on a post, when the post is in it’s own application window rather than the browser … you know what I mean?
Of course I already have a couple enhancement ideas. I’d like to be able to preview the draft in the browsers installed in my computer, since I always check my articles in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox. And I’d like to see a text-to-speech option, since I almost always proof my articles using the Firefox Speak It extension.
Here are the two articles I read that prompted me to try Live Writer:
Windows Live Writer for Blogging - Great or Garbage? by Michael Martine, where Michael describes his experiences with the tool and lists his likes and dislikes. He’s also surprised to be satisfied with a Microsoft tool; I have to say that, despite being steeped in most-things-Microsoft, I’m having the same reaction.
Windows Live Writer by Mark Avey. Mark covers quite a few of the functions he’s used, and likes the tool as much as I think I’m going to. Mark also contrasts Live Writer with Scribefire, a tool I’ve used occasionally that I like but find I need to clean up after before my article is ready to post.
Thanks to Michael and Mark for previewing this software and writing about it; I probably wouldn’t have even tried it otherwise.
Aug
10
I’ve recently noticed that over at Georgia on My Mind, Elementary Historyteacher regularly hosts Georgia Blog Carnivals, featuring posts from Georgia bloggers. I think it would be a good idea, following Joe’s suggestion, to spend some part of this weekend taking a look at the sites EHT lists on her blogroll. Yes, I know they meant last weekend, but I just discovered the carnival a couple of days ago and I was painting my front porch last weekend anyway. With Atlanta temperatures forecast to push 100 degrees for a couple more days at least, I know I won’t be out there painting on Saturday or Sunday, so it will be a good weekend to immerse myself in some new reading.
Aug
10
A few site updates and some housekeeping notes….
I’ve added the social bookmarking button available from the Add This! site to each post.
I’ve also added a Mybloglog “Recent Readers” widget to the sidebar. I’m not entirely sure what to do with Mybloglog yet, but I’ll catch on soon enough. My posts are now appearing there, and I’ve also set up a profile.
In addition, I think I’ve come up with a way to replace my sidebar Blogroll with my Newsgator feeds. Actually Newsgator already lets users generate a script containing their feeds, but it doesn’t take the folder/feed structure into account; it simply creates a list of links. From what I see in Newsgator’s support forums, there have been requests for this feature, but it doesn’t exist yet. I should be able to pull it off anyway with some creative cobbling, and may try it over the weekend. If you happen to stop by, the site should be fine, but the Blogroll may be unstable at times.
Finally, following David Airey and his list of Top 5 Essential WordPress Plugins, I attempted to install a feature I’ve seen on several sites and liked a lot. It’s the Subscribe to Comments plugin, by which anyone leaving a comment can elect to be notified by e-mail when additional comments are posted to the same topic. Unfortunately, activating the plugin causes this WordPress database error for me:
WordPress database error: [Access denied for user to database 'blog']
ALTER TABLE wp_comments ADD COLUMN comment_subscribe enum(’Y',’N')
I take this to mean (and a few searches around the Internet seems to confirm) that the way I’m set up with my web host doesn’t allow me to alter the structure of the WordPress database via this plugin. So, while I like the function a lot and I think it’s a fine plugin, I’m not so sure I should even inquire about changing whatever needs to be changed to make this update possible.
I have to admit this sort of thing frustrates me a bit, and reminds me of a recent article from Lorelle on Wordpress, Bloggers Are Not Webmasters and Webmasters Are Not Bloggers. While I have enough passable HTML knowledge that I’ve been able to modify this site’s various templates and can even poke at the PHP code a bit to make it do my bidding, I’m way over my head when issues surface that have to do with MySQL or the WordPress database. I’m pretty fearless and fairly patient about trying different things and learning from what works and doesn’t work, but I have no context within which to translate a database error and correct it. Lorelle’s article is a good reminder that even though I might find a solution to the problem with additional research and some phone calls to my web host, that’s not how I should be spending my time. So … I’ll give some thought to what I wanted to accomplish by installing the plugin, and take a look at alternatives, whether they’re plugins or something else.
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