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Notes on blogging with Microsoft Word 2007

Word 2007… Interesting piece of software, even enough to provoke a full-scale debate on ISO’s decision to have two standards at a time (isn’t standards are intended to unite people in the first place? :))) but that’s not in the scope of what I want to write right now. And no, I’m not going to tell you where to click in Word to start writing. You can read the good-but-is-the-only-blogging-article at Microsoft Office online for that.

Word is not perfect for blogging. For example the category management is just ill-designed. You’ll have to click a button, select the category and then insert it. The on-page category has a drop down box but the only item inside is “none” (what the…?) and yes, I am using the latest service pack. Possibly someone will eventually tell this to Microsoft to be fixed in future release, but hey, Word is not the only thing Microsoft released for the blogger community! There is Windows Live Writer (which is part of Microsoft new “live.com”-ing-everything strategy) too, which appears better suited for the purpose (the demonstration has pictures, categories and stuff listed in a nice view). Unfortunately it’s a 125MB download, and that’s not financially feasible for me to download (and blog about it here). You can download, try, and tell me instead πŸ˜› [edit: a review about WLW can be found here, it cover most of what WLW have to offer, though it has given WLW quite a bias ;)]

UPDATE: WLW is actually only 5MB πŸ™‚

Back to Word… good for text for not so good for blogs, you may as well encounter some problem blogging:

  • No HTML editing
  • Limited picture upload & management
  • Clumsy interface
  • etc.

I tried and solved some stuff ^^

Picture uploads

Word is a Microsoft software, Live spaces is a Microsoft blogging platform. The irony? Live spaces is the only service that doesn’t provide Atom or XML-RPC so Word has to e-mail blog to Spaces, and because blogging is that hard, even if you read and followed the direction on Live Spaces help, Word will just pop an error up when you tried to blog with pictures. Also, wordpress.com won’t allow you to upload pictures either (self-hosted WordPress installations like mine do); and possibly some other service on Word’s “supported” list won’t either… The solution is uploading the pictures to a separate host. If you ever tried to click on”Picture Options” you’d see some choices

  1. My blog provider: Doesn’t work because you are reading this πŸ˜›
  2. Don’t upload picture: Awn, not helpful at all
  3. My own server: Make 2 fields appear: upload URL and source URL

What is upload URL and source URL? Word help won’t tell you, Microsoft Office online won’t tell you either! It turned out after a couple of queries that, upload URL is something around an FTP address and source URL is the http address at which the picture should appear after being uploaded. The question turned to “what to fill in?” The links provided in the dialog box is just as helpless as the help πŸ˜› You’ll have to find your own provider, which apparently must support the following

  1. FTP uploads
  2. HTTP direct link

Some image hosts support this, photobucket does have a plan with FTP access but that’s not quite cheap :P. IMO, it’s best to use a web host as you could use it for more advanced purposes later ^^. In this example, I’ll demonstrate with freehyperspace5.com, a free hosting service which anyone can register. You could choose your own host but try to avoid:

  1. Byet hosts: they have a high likelihood of deleting file storage only accounts even if their TOS doesn’t say so.
  2. Any other host that specified in their TOS that they are against picture hosting

Register an account at your host, remember [your username], [your password], [ftp host] and [homepage address], then go to word and type

  1. ftp://[your username]:[your password]@[ftp host] in the upload URL in Word, replace the square brackets with your own information. This looks something like ftp://wind:[email protected]
  2. http://[homepage address] for source URL

122608-1512-notesonblog1.png

Done! Press OK twice and now you are ready for picture (and smart art ^^) blogging with Word! No more manually uploading pictures and copy-paste the lengthy URL; just insert and publish! (For a demonstration, have a look at my previous posts, most of them are done with Word!)

Faster blogging

One proof that Word 2007 is designed in such a hurry: Every time you want to blog, you’ll have to click the big red button (the office button :P), choose new, wait for the dialog to appear, choose blog post, OK, wait for the blogging interface to appear… Sick, isn’t it? To start Word exclusively for blogging, you can follow these steps

  1. Browse to the word executable, usually it’s in C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice 12winword.exe
  2. Right-click and choose Create shortcut
  3. Right-click the newly created shortcut and choose Properties, switch to the Shortcut tab
  4. In the Target field, add /t “C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeTemplates1033Blog.dotx” /q, replace “C:Program FilesMicrosoft Office” with your path if necessary 122608-1512-notesonblog2.png
  5. The /t tells Word which template to use at start, the /q (supposedly) suppress the splash screen

  6. Press OK
  7. Move the shortcut to where you want it to be: desktop, quick launch, or even start up if you want to blog every time you turn your machine on πŸ˜›

When I have some time available I’ll try to solve some more problems. (rest assured there are more, just wandering around you’ll see that Word’s blogging function is beta quality software and there hasn’t been any news from it from the word team since 2006)

PS: After some more looking, it turns out that Blogger has its own plugin for Word long ago (download it here), it worked on Word 2000 and above but the interface is not that interesting and it still does not allow you to post pictures – according to this podcast. To me the plug-in appears unupdated for a while…

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