Blogging from Writely

So I'm doing some exploring in Writely one day, when I look a little closer at the top menu bar. The Blog menu has always been there, but I never really paid attention to it. I use .Text for my blog engine, and it always seems like I'm on my own when it comes to integration with other products. After a little Googling, I realize that .Text works just fine when using the MetaWeblog API. I didn't even realize that this was an option. It turns out that the required URL (by default) is http://<host name>/services/metablogapi.aspx. Specify your authentication information, and you're set! I wrote a post (my previous one about datasets actually), clicked the Publish Post to my Blog menu command, and voila! Pure blogging perfection!

Using the built-in .Text editor is OK if you are in Internet Explorer, but it defaults to plaintext in Firefox (well, you can hand-edit the HTML...), and only "pretty good" even in IE. Worse still, no support for draft posts (in any easy way that is). Of course, I could edit the source and add any feature that I wanted, but I just don't have the time or initiative lately to get into a project like that. Adding draft support might not be too challenging, but getting the project to compile and understanding how the classes fit together is another thing entirely. Using Writely also gives me spelling check support! So many options to choose from! I really like that I can edit and repost as well for those times that I need to make a change to something.

If you haven't given Writely a try yet, it's definitely worthwhile. Having Word on an offline computer is often a requirement, so no Web-only product or suite is going to sway me over completely yet, but it sure is nice when I can use it. Since I can load Word documents into Writely, I could compose offline, then upload the document to Writely, and post from there. It's a few extra steps, but most of the time I wouldn't need to do that.

By the way, I have a new version of Time Tracker coming out soon. I trimmed the saving and loading code based on my recent findings, and have added backup file saves (not before losing a week of data unfortunately...). I may just get to those reports that I mentioned once upon a time!