How do you write your blog posts?

On January 17, 2008, in Miscellaneous, by Anuj Gakhar

I was curious to find out how other people write posts on their blogs. I assume its mostly via the web admin interface or via a secure email address which posts to the blog. This is what I used to do as well. However, recently, I found out about Windows Live Writer, which, to be honest, is really cool. It is a desktop tool that allows you to write offline posts, preview them using your blog’s stylesheets and then post them when you are ready. It is packed with a lot other features. I think this is really useful as the editors in a webpage are always a bit dodgy when you write long posts. The best part is , it supports most of the blog softwares out there, including WordPress which I use. This piece of software from Microsoft does look really neat.

I know, most people in the CF community use blogCFC, which according to me is a great piece of software, but I just didnt happen to use it when I started blogging. I just installed WordPress to start looking into it and as I started blogging more and more, I didnt get a chance to change my blog software. Unfortunately, Windows Live writer does not support blogCFC officially, but my gut feeling is, because it uses XMlRPC to post to the blog, it might be worth it to try to post to blogCFC using this.

By the way, I am writing this post from within Windows Live Writer.

Tagged with:  

29 Responses to How do you write your blog posts?

  1. Ben Nadel says:

    To be totally honest, I start off by writing all of my blog posts in HomeSite. It’s a fantastic editor and enjoy spending most of my day in it πŸ™‚ This is just to get all my thoughts down on paper, spell check, reread, maybe save for later if I have a meeting to run to. Once it is done, I just copy and paste it into my blog editor. At that point, I have to do formatting like adding links, bolding text, add sub-headers, and inserting images.

    This method, while it may seem a bit round-about has been working wonderfully. Plus, I have a .txt copy of practically all of my blog posts, which helps me sleep at night πŸ™‚

  2. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Ben, you should then try this Live writer, it does exactly the same thing for you as Homesite plus you get the added benefit of support for all known blog softwares. I have started using it just yesterday and I am liking it a lot.

  3. Ben Nadel says:

    @Anuj,

    I will check it out, thanks.

  4. Jim Priest says:

    I’m guessing Windows Live Writer unfortunately only works on… Windows πŸ™‚

    I either write it in whatever text editor I have handy or I do it in an email and send it to myself. For a bit I tinkered with doing it in Google docs as well which can publish to your blog…

  5. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Jim, Using Google Docs might be a good idea. And yes, Live writer works is for Windows, I assume you are not a Windows fan then πŸ™‚

  6. Jim Priest says:

    I use Windows at work, Linux at home so I try to use tools I can use on both platforms just to make life simpler.

  7. Dan Vega says:

    Windows Live Writer is really a great tool. There are many features that I love such as the ability to save drafts and all of the image features. The only drawback is that I had to keep going back and forth when I needed to post code. You are right though, because blogCFC support xmlrpc you can use it. I have a couple of tutorials on it.

    http://www.danvega.org/blog/index.cfm/2007/6/29/Windows-Live-Writer-Beta-BlogCFC-Part-I

  8. I also write all my blog posts in HomeSite first, then copy and paste them into my blogs admin tool, I do find that process a tad bit tedious though, I’ll check out this Windows Live Writer and see if I like it. Thanks!

  9. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Dan, that sounds cool. However, I cant get to your website at this time. Connection timeouts. I assume your traffic has gone high after the CFwindow release πŸ™‚ I will check back laters πŸ˜‰

    @Scott, it sure is worth a try….

  10. Dan Vega says:

    haha, I do not get that much traffic. Can you get to the main page? Someone else was having this issue and it has something to do with the firewall blocking any urls with dash dash — in it.

  11. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Dan, no, not even the main page. it worked once and then when I tried again, it didnt.

  12. radek says:

    Anuj, good to see started using Windows Live Writer πŸ™‚ It has only to drawbacks – one is (as Dan mentioned) that you have to go back to Worpress Admin when posting code and the other one is that you can’t place files other than images.

  13. Dan Vega says:

    That would be the firewall, give it 20 minutes πŸ™‚ haah

  14. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @ Radek, when I write some code in my posts, I just stick them within the <pre> tags, and Javascript and stylesheets know that its code. And that I can do from the HTML code view of Windows Live Writer. So I didnt have to go back and forth between WLR and blog admin.

  15. radek says:

    That is right Anuj – but if you have to add files other than images you can’t do it from Writer. So you have to do it from WP Admin. And WP Admin will break your PRE formatting πŸ™‚

  16. Hi Anuj

    nice blog you have here…. I run several blogs that are based on WP, their WP admin is quite functional and have nice layout… If you don’t use it – try it out, I think you will like it πŸ™‚

  17. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Flex Developer, Thanks! my blog is already running on latest version of WP. But it still is a web based WYSIWYG editor which can be a pain to work with at times.

  18. Jim Priest says:

    FWIW you can turn off the WYSIWYG editor. I can’t stand that thing and disable it by default…

  19. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Jim, I agree to that. These web based editors are more of a time wasters than time savers.

  20. Dave Shuck says:

    I use the InstantSpot editor to do most of mine. Since it allows you to easily reference other entries, tag, applie categories, allow you to embed InstantSpot widgets, code, textblocks, and regular s , it works best for most of what I do. However, with the most recent release we opened up XMLRPC, so I have been using ScribeFire as well which is awesome! If your blog software accepts XMLRPC posting, give it a shot. If it doesn’t… [insert InstantSpot plug here] πŸ˜€

  21. Dave Shuck says:

    man… should have proof read huh? I really do now how to spell “apply”, I promise.

    Additionally, it appears to have stripped out [embed/] (only with html brackets rather than square brackets).

    That second sentence should say: “….textblocks, and regular [embeds/]s , it…”

  22. Dave Shuck says:

    oh man… I win the typo award today. Where is the big red reset button? (sigh…. off to the coffee pot)

  23. I use Windows Live Writer myself. However, I actually made some changes to the BlogCFC XML-RPC code to ease creation of blog entries.

    The biggest thing I did was add support so that I could type in the BlogCFC “special” tags (such as more and code) so that I could write them directly in the WYSIWYG interface and the XML-RPC code then converts that escaped HTML into standard HTML tags.

    Also for those of you that don’t know, Windows Live Writer was developed by a company that JJ Allaire now works for (I believe he was one of the founders of the company.) Microsoft then swallowed up the tool.

  24. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Dan, Thats news! I didnt know that about WLR. … another example of big fish eating up smaller ones….

    @Dave, I havent looked into ScribeFire , I will give it a try.

  25. rob says:

    I generally use ecto on Mac (http://infinite-sushi.com/software/ecto/), and my blogging plugin for Eclipse on Linux (http://robrohan.com/projects/afae/) which, last time I checked, works with blogCFC.

  26. Mark Mandel says:

    I tend to write mine first in google docs.

    That way I can spell check it and even share it with people if I want an extra pair of eyes before it goes live.

    From there I just copy paste is straight into my WYSIWYG editor, and blammo! Instant blog post. :oD

  27. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Rob, Afae Project looks interesting. Will take a look.

    @Mark, looks like quite a few people use google Docs…honestly, I didnt know that google docs does allow integration with blogging softwares…this is cool!

  28. Anuj Gakhar says:

    I just found out that you can also use MS Office to write your blog posts. Its in-built.
    http://www.killertechtips.com/2008/03/29/post-to-your-blog-from-microsoft-office-word-2007/

  29. Summer Davis says:

    Hi!

    Just like you I am also a blogger. The server you just mentioned is very interesting. Maybe I can try it out, I want to be able to write when I am offline, That way all my ideas will be compiled. Thank you for posting this!

    Summer Davis
    ArtPrintsReviewed.com

Leave a Reply to Dan G. Switzer, II Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Β© 2011 Anuj Gakhar
%d bloggers like this: