Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Using A Blog Editor

Using a Blog Editor

This week I've been participating in a KnowWeeks course called 'Browserless Blogging ' with Grant Potter.  One of our tasks has been to try out a desk top blog editor.  I think that this just means using something other than your blog's own editor that can post directly to your blog.  So writing your post in Word and cutting and pasting it to your blog's editor doesn't count.  And if you've read Sue Waters' post on this you'll know that that is a bad idea anyway.

As I was going through the list of options there was one that I had tried; Flock's blog editor.  I wasn't crazy about it as it lost all of the formatting when it uploaded to edublogs; though maybe I needed to tweek some settings.

Anyway, as I was going through the list and trying to decide which other blog editor I'd like to try, it occured to me that Google Docs has a 'post to blog' feature.  I like writing my posts in Google Docs, because that it where I do most of my writing.  When I went to check out the 'post to blog' feature today I realized that when I tried in the past, I hadn't been able to get the setting right.  When I looked at it today I realized that the blog URL I had put in was in the wrong format.  Another post by Sue Waters helped me to figure it out.  To post from Google Docs to Edublogs you use the following URL: http://YOURBLOGUSERNAME.edublogs.org/path/to/xmlrpc.php

So this is my test of posting from Google Docs.  I know it won't add tags or categories, but I'm gonna give it a whirl.  Where do you post your blogs from?

Blog (detall) [sic] by Lady Madonna Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

5 comments:

  1. I love to write in google docs and did not realize I could post to blogs. Will have to try that on my next post! I usually use my blog editor and definitely agree about not using word first.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glad my posts helped you.

    Nowadays I blog always from my dashboard but I have also posted from my iphone using WordPress for iPhone. I used to use Windows Live Writer which was quite good and that works on your desktop - you might like to give that a try?

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Louise, you just choose the Share button, select publish as a web page and then blog settings--once the settings are configured you can select 'post to blog'. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to get it to post with a title and tags. It is a convenient way to have a back up of your blog post though.

    @Sue, thanks for the suggestion of Windows Live Writer, I'll have to give it a look-see.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Claire,

    My absolute favourite way to post to my blog is using the ScribeFire plugin for Firefox. All you have to do is hit F8 and a great word processing window pops up in the bottom half of the browser. It keeps all the formatting and you can add tags. I really like being able to read a blog post that sparked some thoughts and also write about it all in the same window. Another great feature is that you can highlight a URL and hit the hyperlink button and it will automatically put the URL in for you. This makes adding hyperlinks really easy.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Phil, thanks for sharing your experience with ScribeFire. It sounds like it has some good features. Does it deal well with images?

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for leaving a comment on my blog! Any spam comments will be deleted.