OakLeaf Blog Gets Categories and Atom 1.0

I've just switched the OakLeaf blog to the new Blogger Beta version that supports categories, Atom 1.0 (finally), and RSS 2.0. All posts on and after June 13, 2006 have detailed categories (Blogger calls them Labels) collections at the end of the post, most of which duplicate the Technorati links. Earlier items have major category labels, such as LINQ or SQL Server. Categories let some RSS/Atom feed readers, such as Internet Explorer 7.0, filter items by category. The following screen capture shows IE 7 Feeds view's scrolling listbox with the LINQ to XSD label selected.

Note: One of the things I like about IE 7's Feeds view is that its chronology is based on Last Updated date/time, not the original post's date/time. This means that updated posts percolate to the top of the list; many of my posts are updated two or three times.

Here's Dare Obasanjo's three-pane, open-source RSS Bandit aggregator (Jubilee Edition Beta 1) displaying the preceding post:

Windows Live Writer (WLW) beta 1.0.1(6) works with Blogger Beta, as shown by the WYSIWYG screen capture below: Note: You must upgrade WLS to version 1.0.1(6) or later to work with Blogger Beta after early November 2006. However, WLW 1.0.1(6) doesn't support adding Blogger Beta Labels as tags. For the moment you'll need to do a final edit in the Web-based Blogger editor, which hasn't changed significantly in the Beta version. Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer, WLW, Blogger, Blogger Beta

Blogger Finally Gives OakLeaf Blog Spam Clearance

My August 6, 2006 Windows Live Writer (WLW) review couldn't test the Web Layout and Web Preview features or post directly to the OakLeaf Web site because the Blogger API includes a spam blocker, presumably a CAPTCHA. I sent a message to Blogger requesting removal of the spam blocker the same day as the review.

Today, 18 days after my request, Blogger finally verified that my blog wasn't a splog. This is a test post to see if removing the Blogger API's spam blocker enables Windows Live Writeer's Web Layout and Web Preview modes, as well as publishing posts and posting drafts. Previously only drafts posted. Sure enough, you're seeing WLW here in Web Layout mode.

and here in Web Preview mode.

Not only do I get an instant view of the post, but also no CAPTCHA to complete before manually posting to the blog.

If your Blogger blog requires you to complete a CAPTCHA to post, send a "Non-spam review and verification request for BlogName.blogspot.com" message to support@blogger.com. After a long hiatus, you should receive the following message:

Hello,

Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal.

Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

Update: A newer version of Tim Heuer's Flickr4Writer add-in solves some minor problems:

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer, Flickr4Writer, WLW, Blogger

Writely Beta Finally Opens (with a Thud)

Hard on the heels of the Windows Live Writer (WLW) beta, Google finally took the wraps off Writely by opening a public beta. Google would have done better by taking a few more months to debug their free online word-processor candidate before exposing it to the general public. Jen asked in the Writely blog:

Why have we reopened now? Maybe it was because we just won a very nice product review on CNET ... or maybe it was that ten-billionth person who emailed us to say, "Hey what's UP? When will Writely open again?" Well, in fact, now Writely is truly ready to open its doors to everyone, so let's just do it!

I'm sure the timing of the WLW beta influenced Google's timing for releasing the Writely beta, but I'm not as sure that "Writely is truly ready to open its doors to everyone." For example, I immediately encountered problems in IE 7 Beta 3 deleting selected text and formatting paragraphs as block quotes. Note: WLW is a downloadable .NET 2.0 WinForm app, while Writely is an online .NET 2.0 WebForm app. (The .aspx file extension indicates ADO.NET Web pages.)

Writely as a Blog Editor It's a good bet that many Writely users will test it for blog posting, but they're likely to be disappointed. For example, I set up the OakLeaf Systems Blogger blog as the single publishing point in this dialog (Writely currently supports posting only to a single blog): Clicking test returned the following message: However, when I tried to publish the document to the OakLeaf blog (there's no option to post a draft version), I received this error message: (http://www.blogger.com/api/RPC2?rnd649026752=69898776 does not appear to be a valid url). However, Writely was successful at posting a draft, which I converted to this post. (The problem is undoubtedly due to the captcha entry required for posts.) Writely gets the nod over WLW for image handling because Google stores your images on line if you insert them with IE7. I specified Center alignment for all images I imported, but all graphics ended up left aligned. The 1 px black right border on all images is an artifact of the capture program, which doesn't appear when capturing in other applications. Image size settings don't include an option to maintain aspect ratio, so I had to calculate the height setting when limiting the width of images to 400 px wide (the maximum width of the text area of my blog). I gave up and used Paint.NET to resize the images with much better quality scaling. Blog preview doubles the number of newline characters. Here's the top of the test edit page:

And here's the corresponding top of the blog post preview: Browser Change

My results with IE 7 were so poor that I decided to check out Firefox 1.5. So I saved the document, opened it in Firefox, and rechecked the problems I was experiencing.

Firefox correctly formatted the block quote, but didn't fix any of the other issues that I encountered and described above. Firefox appeared to save images to the local file system instead of to http://www.writely.com/File.aspx?id=dcq9twsv_10hmwpzf or the like, caused problems with detecting image dimensions during insertion, and didn't respect my default 350-px maximum width setting for the text: Back to IE7 Beta 3 Round-tripping content between Writely and my OakLeaf Systems blog turned out to be a nightmare. Content copied and pasted from Blogger's Compose window appears OK in the Writely editor (except it's not in the selected font), but you must export HTML from Writely and paste it into Blogger's Edit HTML window, then do major fixups due to doubling or tripling of newline characters on importing to Blogger.

At this point, I decided to copy and paste the HTML with IE7 Beta 3 to the OakLeaf blog so I could point folks in the Google Groups: Writely Discussion Group to examples of the issues. Join the group and see what others have to say about my problems. Watch for frequent updates as I see what other reviewers and folks in the Writely Discussion Group have to say about Writely's readiness for prime time.

Interim Conclusion

Writely isn't even close to cooked as a blog editor. I doubt if CNET tested Writely's compatibility with "Google Blogger" (or any other blogging software) for its review. I'm also concerned about the different set of issues I encountered with IE 7 and Firefox. For now, I'll stick with WLW for blog editing, despite having to add images as a second operation in Firefox.

Paul Graham of the Y Combinator venture-capital group takes the position that competing head-to-head with a Google app ensures the immediate or eventual demise of a start-up. He cites the flat-lining of Kiko as an example, but David Heinemeier of 37Signals says "Google does not render resistance futile." Dare Obasanjo concludes that "Kiko was a feature, not a full-fledged online destination let alone a viable business." Fortunately, Google doesn't need—or, I assume, intend—to make a business out of Writely.

Competing online word-processors, such as Zoho Writer (beta), ThinkFree Office 3 (beta), or Glide Write 1.0 (beta) might suffer eventual extinction by a greatly improved Writely, but it's not likely that the final Writely version will shoot down WYSWYG blog editors like WLW, Qumana, RocketPost, Performancing (for Firefox), and ecto (for MacOSX and Windows).

Note: RocketPost's attempt to charge US$12 for the software might lead to immediate extinction by WLW, Qumana, Performancing, or ecto.

A read-only version of the Writely document for the initial version of this post is here.

Technorati Tags: Writely, Writely Beta, Windows Live Writer, WLW, Qumana, Performancing, ecto, Blog Editors, Blogger

Windows Live Writer (Beta) Blogger Test-Drive

GigaOm and TechCrunch, inter alia, announced that Microsoft released the first beta of Windows Live Writer (WLW) this morning. I've been underwhelmed by the current Blogger editor, so I downloaded and ran the installer to give WLW a test drive with the OakLeaf System site. WLW is a .NET WinForm app—as you'd expect—and thus requires previous installation of the .NET Framework 2.0. Note: This updated post, Blogger Finally Gives OakLeaf Blog Spam Clearance, demonstrates the solution to the template import problem. Installation ran without a hitch, other than the message that WLW was unable to import my blog's template to establish a compatible style. To obtain style information, WLW attempts a temporary post, which ultimately appeared in Blogger's Edit Posts page as a draft. (See the "Wait for Blogger Post Permissions" topic below.) Of course, the installer wanted to add the Windows Live Toolbar to IE; I didn't. The installer also offers to create a Windows Live Spaces account for non-blogified users.

WLW's GUI

Without template data, WLW's GUI is what you'd expect for a basic WinForm text editor without a lot of bells and whistles:

The Windows Live Writer: First Impressions post on Nathan Weinberg's Inside Microsoft blog demonstrates editing and adding images in Web Layout view after successfully downloading style information. As Nathan observes, "The Normal View is the straight up simplest way to edit. It is fast, responsive, and lets you do your work."

Note: The LiveSite blog has a 15-minute interview with J.J. Allaire, the founder of Onfolio and Architect of the Writer team. Microsoft acquired Onfolio on March 8, 2006.

Typing in the text pane feels much more like Microsoft Word, WordPad, and other Windows text editors than Blogger's editor. WLW's block quotes and bullet/numbered lists are more stable during the editing process. Finally, the WLW's HTML code omits the large number of span tags that tend to obscure Blogger's source.

Wait for Blogger Post Permissions

Attempting to save a Blogger draft or post while writing this article opened this dialog:

Which contains this Blogger message (the blogID is fictitious):

com.google.blogger.exceptions.AutospamException: Your post has been saved as a draft instead of published. You must go to Blogger.com to publish your post. To prevent these errors in the future, request a review at: http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?blogID=88888888. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Here's part of the Blogger page to request removal of the captcha requirement:

Blogger saves drafts and posts as drafts until someone at Blogger inspects your blog and OKs elimination of the word-recognition anti-span device. After your site passes the splog test, you can chose Weblog, Edit Weblog Settings to reattempt capturing the style for the Web Layout view.

Full Disclosure: I wrote this post with WLW, added it as a draft to Blogger, and then added images from the Blogger server.

No Image Publishing for Blogger

When you attempt to publish a page with an image, WLW claims in the following dialog that the "weblog doesn't support image publishing," which is obviously an untrue statement. Blogger doesn't support the newMediaObject API, which WLW requires to upload and display image, video, audio, or other media object files.

It's nice that WLW offers the alternative of specifying an FTP site for image publishing, but it's doubtful that most Blogger users would opt for FTP image delivery when Blogger offers its own image storage and processing system.

Unlike the Blogger editor, WLW doesn't have a center alignment option for images.

Minor Issue

I'm accustomed to typing HTML character entity references (entities) for special characters, such as — (mdash) in Blogger's WYSIWYG editor. Clicking the Edit Html tab, and then clicking the Compose tab substitutes the special character for the entity in the Blogger WYSIWYG editor. Microsoft needs this feature, too.

Major Kudos

WLW offers multiple-level Undo/Redo capabilities (Ctrl+z, Ctrl+y). Hoorah!

Find Text (Ctrl+F) makes it easy to find your place in long posts.

Blogger doesn't have post categories and corresponding tags. (Microsoft calls tags key words.) This means I need to add Technorati tags in the Blogger HTML editor manually. WLW makes it easier to add Technorati tags because the Insert Hyperlink dialog lets you add the required rel="tag" attribute:

The WLW post on the Windows Live Spaces blog mentions the Windows Live Writer SDK lets developers extend the capabilities of Writer to add content types like:

• Images from online photo publishing sites
• Embedded video or audio players
• Product thumbnails and/or links from e-commerce sites
• Tags from tagging services

I'd certainly like to see extensions for images, embedded video players, and automated Technorati tags ASAP.

Update 8/14/2006: Dare Obasanjo reported that Tim Heuer has written plug-ins for Technorati tags and Flickr images and I've installed them. All but one of the Blogger images in this entry were replaced with Tim's Flickr4Writer add-in.

Conclusion

I'll probably use WLW to write the text for my future posts and add Blogger images with Firefox. I've found it necessary to switch from IE 6/7 to Firefox to reliably insert the images after storing them on the Blogger image server, so there's not much added effort. The alternative is to use Tim's Flickr4Writer add-in, but I found the current version has a couple of minor quirks. On the whole, WLW looks to me like a great start, even with the image and entity issues.

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer, WLW, Blogger