28 October 2010

How to Post to Your Blog with Word 2010?

While I am personally not using Word 2010, I am sure that there are many bloggers who already relocated to this text editor platform. So, the question for those who use it: do you know that it is possible to write and publish a blog post using the same application you are using for anything else?

Device Magazine provides detailed review of this new Word feature I would like to present today.

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It makes perfect sense that Microsoft should want their users to employ Word for all word processing tasks, not just the ones that take place on documents stored on their PC or laptop.

Microsoft have become more and more aware of the wider uses for their Office applications in recent years, and have even released an online version of Office which is free to use for domestic users and offers the ability to save work in the cloud.

Writing a blog post with Word 2010 is nothing more but an extension of this. You are probably thinking "so I can write a blog with Word, but I can do that anyway and paste it in" but this method allows you to connect Word directly to the blog software, removing the need for any desktop or browser based blog editors like Scribefire, and dispensing with any problems with Word formatting causing problems with the display of your blog post.

Write a Blog Post with Word 2010

You can easily create a new Word document for your post and have it ready to publish to your blog in minutes. There are several blog platforms supported by Word 2010:
  • Windows Live Spaces
  • Blogger
  • SharePoint blog
  • Community Server
  • TypePad
  • WordPress
…and if you don’t use any of these, you can enter manual configuration options by choosing “Other”.

To set this up, create a new document in Word 2010 (File > New) and choose Blog post under Available Templates.

You will then be prompted to setup an account – here you should choose from one of the options as listed above. For instance, if you're using a WordPress blog, you will be prompted to enter the Blog Post URL for the XMLRPC.php script that manages links from third party apps like Word. You will see something like this:
http://<Enter your blog URL here>/xmlrpc.php

If you use a private WordPress blog, simply enter the URL as instructed, and then add your username and password. Many WordPress users have blogs hosted at www.wordpress.com – they should enter
http://<blog account name>.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

For Blogger and TypePad accounts you need only enter your username and password, while SharePoint blogs require just the URL. Windows Live Spaces blogs require the space name and your “secret word”, while Community Server requires a special URL similar to that shown above (to the “metablog.ashx” script) as well as a username and password. Once you have configured the account for your blog, you’re ready to start posting!

Publish Your Blog with Word 2010

With your blog linked up to Word, you can then proceed to write a new post. Using the Blog Post and Insert tabs, you can visit the Home page, choose a Category for your blog, apply text formatting (if supported by your blog) and insert Tables, Pictures and Clip Art, Hyperlinks and other media options.

A few useful blog platform tools are missing, however – there is now way, for example, to split your post so that only a small portion of it appears on your blog’s home page. This would need to be added manually in your blog admin screen. Similarly, tags and labels cannot be added, but other than this, you can use Word as a great alternative to tools like Scribefire or your blogs own admin screen.

One word of warning: when your blog account username and password are used by from Word, they may not be encrypted. This will be down to the authentication method used by your blogging platform, so make sure you make regular backups of your blog and that you don’t employ a username and password that you might also use for other purposes.


23 October 2010

Freeware Blog Editor from Firefox Browser



Deepest Sender is a blogging client that runs inside popular browsers Firefox, SeaMonkey, and XULRunner.

So, Deepest Sender is a blogging client for Firefox-based applications. What does this mean? Well, it means that instead of having to go to the Update page on LiveJournal/WordPress/Blogger/whatever, or loading up a separate client program, all you have to do is hit Ctrl+\, or click the button in your toolbar, and you can start posting.

Advantages over using update pages:
* Multiple accounts - You can have multiple accounts in Deepest Sender, and quickly switch between them.
* WYSIWYG - An integrated mini-HTML editor, with countless hacks implemented to get it to function as well and as neatly as possible. You can also switch between that and source view, or preview mode. No more typing countless <li> tags!
* Sidebars! You can load up Deepest Sender in the Mozilla/Firefox sidebar, and post from there.
* Drag and drop - select part of a page, drag it onto DS, and it's there!
* Music detection - if you have Foxy Tunes installed, or are running Windows and are using a plugin for your media player that is compatible with the Windows Media Player blogging plugin, then you can have music automatically detected for you. If you can get your player to write song details to a text file, then DS can detect the current music from that, too.
* Spellchecking - if you're running Firefox 2 or SeaMonkey with spellcheck installed, you can spellcheck your entries!
* Crash recovery - if Mozilla/Firefox crashes while you were halfway through typing up a huge entry, don't worry! When you next load Deepest Sender up, it'll try and recover as much of your post as possible.
* Load and save drafts - want to come back to something later? Save it as a draft, then get to work on another post. You can load it back up later.
* Easily edit posts - instead of poking through LiveJournal's edit system, just hit Ctrl+Shift+H, and use the calendar to find the post you were after, load it up, and edit it. If you're using other blogging protocols, you can easily search through the last 15 posts.
* Offline mode - Can't connect? Well, type away at your post, then load Deepest Sender at a later time when you can connect to your server!

Advantages over other clients:
* Easy installation - go to the Deepest Sender site (or Mozilla update), click install, restart your browser, and start posting! Even if you're on a computer account that doesn't have administrative priveliges (on Firefox)!
* Small download - how many other blogging clients are under 300KB?
* Cross-platform - Deepest Sender will run on any OS that Firefox will run on. Type up posts at work on your Windows computer, then come home and type up more posts on your Linux box - using the same program!

Screenshots (Click to Enlarge):


Latest software release: 0.9.3 (June 2, 2010).


Review more free software for blog publishing (48 items to choose from at the moment) at RateItAll Rating List.


16 October 2010

6 Applications to post on Blogger Blog from Android Phones



I love my Android based HTC Incredible. Actually, it is the first mobile phone I really love. More and more functions, unthinkable for being performed through mobile phone can be done fast and efficiently now. It is time for me to think about convenient mobile blogging agent to be able post from the road to my blogs. In search for the suitable client I came to several utilities on the market I would like to share with you:

1. Blogaway for Android is a simple blogger client for your Android phone that helps you blog on the go. Blogaway works with blogs hosted on Blogger (the next Beta client is developed to support Wordpress blogs as well). Blogaway supports almost everything that you need to post a simple blog with images, links and videos. It works with blogs hosted on blogspot as well as on custom domains. You can also read blogs of your favorite authors’ right from inside Blogaway.

Here are a few features that make Blogaway a great blogging tool for your mobile. And we are continuously adding more.

- Multiple accounts/blogs support.
- Posts with images (single), videos(single), links, tags etc.
- Add your favorite blogs to Blogaway.
- Read/post comments on blogs.
- Share your post's URL through multiple channels.
- Geotag your posts.


My rating: 4 of 5.

2. AndroBlogger is very basic Blogger authoring client to read, post to and comment on blogs based on Blogger engine. Recently more features were added, making the utility more useful, such as pictures (as URL only), text formatting, rich preview, etc. Most international encodings are now supported.


My rating: 2.5 of 5

3. Bloggeroid is a small application (about 50KB), which can help you blog on Blogger blogs "attached" to any of your Google Accounts. You may upload many pictures, and you decide where in your posts those images will be placed. You may use also some kind of "wikisyntax", so when you will wrote **bold** in the result you will have word bold in bold, for __italic__ it will be italic. You can edit existing posts, and you can choose if this should be edited in HTML or in this "wikisyntax".


My rating: 3.5 of 5

4. Blogger-Droid is a simple Blogger client, allowing to create/view/edit/delete blog posts on Blogger Blog. You can also post comments to published blog posts, upload picture(s) and video(s). So, with this application you can easily share pictures, videos, YouTube clips, links etc.


My rating: 4 of 5

5. I am Blogger is a lightweight application with limited functionality that allows keep your travel status in Twitter and Blogger's blog. You can send tweets and short blog records with your location and photo.


My rating: 2 of 5

6. Moby is a multi-platform utility, allows its users to share photos, videos, audio and text from their Android based phones with your friends, family and contacts on all the major social networking sites and services.  Moby distributes to more than 25 sites and services including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Netlog, and many more.


My rating: 3.5 of 5


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