Beta or not, I simply cannot understand why there is a need to add a post (which I have found no easy way to delete) on your blog every time you install Live Writer.
I just installed it on my laptop and, presto, there’s another “temporary” post I can’t get rid of.
This needs to be seems to have been fixed.
Update: When I posted using Live Writer, the temporary post seems to have disappeared.
Tags: live writer
I’ve been using Live Writer to write my posts for the last several days. I still like it a lot, but I have now used it enough to suggest a few new features it needs.
1. An option to send pings only on the initial publication of the post. I don’t want to re-ping when I edit to fix the invariable typo.
2. A way to save templates. All of us have repetitive posts that contain a lot of the same elements. Give us a way to save and pull up multiple templates. Sure you can do it now by creating drafts, but that doesn’t work nearly as well as a separate template menu would work. For one thing, the naming convention doesn’t lend itself to doing it that way.
3. I don’t know what it is exactly, but there is a keyboard command for publishing that I have accidentally hit 4 times in 4 days. This is an unnecessary caps-lock sort of annoyance. Give us the ability to customize- or delete entirely- keyboard commands.
4. While I enjoy the WYSIWYG interface, the resulting html is jumbled beyond recognition. Can’t we clean it up a little with spaces between the paragraphs, etc.? Blogger’s editing application does this pretty well, so it shouldn’t be hard to implement.
And one new plugin I want…
5. One that will allow me to input the Amazon ISBN or ASIN number and generate a link with my Amazon Associates information included.
And one problem I have noticed…
6. For some reason, my new posts are not showing up as new in Bloglines. When you click my feed, they are there, but my blog is not showing up in bold with the number of new posts in parenthesis like it used to and like it is supposed to. Has anyone else noticed this?
Tags: blogging, live+writer, bloglines
Dwight Silverman on his forthcoming look at antivirus applications: “I am not going to focus on their malware-stopping effectiveness, but rather how well they get along with other programs, user-friendliness and their effects on system performance.”
I predict a last place finish for Norton AntiVirus.
On a related note, I am a long-time Consumer Reports subscriber. I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another about creating viruses to test anti-virus applications, but most of them claim to be able to identify new viruses by their behavior. And how else could one test that claim?
UPDATE: Randy Abrams answers my question in a Comment and in this post.
Tags: antivirus, consumer+reports
The hopeful stream of plugins for Live Writer has begun to flow, with three so far (that I have found).
The first is called Flickr4Writer, and as its name implies, it helps you insert Flickr photos into your post.
Clouds at Sunset
It allows you to search by user name (i.e., your own, to browse your photos) or by tag. Inserting this photo was quick and simple.
The second is called Tag4Writer, and it is the answer to my request last night for a Technorati tag maker. It has presets for Technorati, Delicious, Flickr, IceRocket Buzznet, 43 Things and LiveJournal, plus a Custom setting where you can customize a tag or make a preset for another service. I made the tag below with it. Very easy, though I wish the + did not appear in the text.
The third is called Currently Listening, and inserts the name of the song you are listening to in your post. Because it only supports Windows Media Player and iTunes and I use the massively under-appreciated J. River Media Center, I have not tried it yet. As soon as it supports Media Center (or perhaps Last.fm‘s Audioscrobbler, which would also work), I’ll give it a whirl. Even if I can’t use it yet, it is a neat idea.
24 hours later, Live Writer is significantly better than it was when released. As more and more plugins get developed, I predict it will become the standard for blog editing and management.
Tags:
Dave Winer more or less lays one on the head of today’s internet darling, Microsoft’s Live Writer. Granted, he starts out saying its great that Microsoft made it, but the tone is more rain than sunshine.
He says it should be part of the browser. Maybe, but let’s not forget that something in the nature of .00001% of the people who use browsers blog. It would be feature overload for most- similar to the way I felt when I tried Opera. There is a marginal utility to adding features to software.
Just because you can add something doesn’t mean you should.
Back in the day, I used the free version of Microsoft’s Front Page HTML editor to create some early web pages. So there was a wysiwyg editor back then for the task at hand- nobody knew a blog from a grasshopper back then. Later, as I learned html, I used the excellent, but long forgotten HotMetal Pro. Even today there is one wysiwyg HTML editor that I like- Namo Web Editor. It’s not the wysiwyg editor part that makes Live Writer so interesting- it’s its simplicity and the way it works across many platforms.
Dave is a scientist. He creates very cool stuff for geeks. Microsoft is a merchant. It creates stuff for the masses. The reason there is a market for what Microsoft makes is because there are a lot of people who are not smart enough to use what Dave makes.
Well there’s that and all the money Microsoft has to promote its products.
But the bottom line is that Microsoft has made something that can be used by non-geeks and non-programmers to fill a need. That’s why I think it will take off while some perhaps cooler, but harder, products didn’t.
Sometimes Dave-light is good enough.
Technorati Tags: live writer
Dwight Silverman raves about the public beta of Microsoft’s new blog editor, Windows Live Writer. Ed Bott does too.
Ed points out that the guy behind Live Writer is J. J. Allaire, founder of Allaire Corp., which developed web site editors ColdFusion and HomeSite. Those were good programs, so that bodes well for Live Writer.
I’m writing this post with Live Writer and although the proof is in how it will look once I publish it- so far it looks really nifty.
I need to test an image insert, so here’s another photo from our recent trip to the Frio River.
And I need to test the maps, so here’s a map of Concan, Texas. You can see the Frio River running north to south.
Two Features I Really, Really Want
Here are two features I want (paging J.J.)- a way to upload an image to allyoucanupload.com and insert it into a blog post with one click. Now that would be righteous. Also a plug-in for making Technorati tags is a must.
As many of you know, I host my own blog and related content, but use blogger to create and publish posts. While I have long wanted to move to WordPress, only to be stopped in my tracks by URL handling problems, Blogger is not a bad platform at all- at least when you use it the way I do.
One thing that I don’t like about Blogger, however, is its 18th century looking spell checker. A more robust spell checker alone might be enough to get me to adopt Live Writer (why do I think Day Tripper every time I type that?).
UPDATE: After I temporarily disabled Zone Alarm so the program could communicate with my server in order to upload photos, it works really well. Give me the two features described above and I’m sold.
Remember the other day, when I mentioned that I got joe jobbed?
Well all of the related bounces, spam notices and complaints have finally tapered off to nothing. Except one. The most persistent mail server in the world continues to try to deliver the spoofed email to one last non-working email address.
Here’s the text of the most recent of many updates this dedicated server sent me:
“This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its recipients after more than 528 hours on the queue on dime81.dizinc.com.
The message identifier is: 1G0qnh-0008Mz-Is
The date of the message is: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 07:13:41 +0400
The subject of the message is: Re: your letter
The address to which the message has not yet been delivered is:
save to /
generated by lam@iconmedia.com.hk
No action is required on your part. Delivery attempts will continue for some time, and this warning may be repeated at intervals if the message remains undelivered. Eventually the mail delivery software will give up, and when that happens, the message will be returned to you.”
528 hours later? Are you kidding me?
If every mail server was this persistent, the entire internet would crash under the weight of undelivered spam.
Davis Freeberg, who shares my dislike of anything connected to Real Networks, lands some well deserved blows in this very interesting post.
He correctly points out the absurdity of Real’s obsession with Microsoft’s not even released yet Zune player and then sums up his version of what I have called the Real Player Syndrome in this flurry to the jaw:
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to uninstall their software from my computer. Everytime I swear off their Real player, some clip comes along which I need their proprietary software to use. It’s neat that Real wants to put an end to DRM that locks consumers into proprietary systems, but I’d like to see them address their own service before they complain about big bad Microsoft.”
Amen brother.
That’s why I will forego watching something rather than install what is, in my opinion, computer-hijacking bloatware.
While doing last night’s RanchoCast, I thought of an application that would not only bring podcasting to the masses, but would also be very useful for current podcast listeners. I’m going to tell some smart guy or gal somewhere how to put themselves on the Web 2.0 map.
I have said before and I’ll say again, that as long as podcasting is technologically or psychologically tied to iPods and other portable music players, it will never reach the mainstream. Nobody I know, either socially or professionally, uses an iPod or other portable music player. Not one person. A couple of people I know have iPods, but they tell me that after the initial thrill of having one wore off, the iPods got relegated to a drawer somewhere, rarely to see the light of day.
Granted, I’m sure lots of kids and college students have iPods, and if you don’t mind ignoring millions and millions of grownups with lots of disposable cash, then so be it.
But if you want to bring podcasting to the masses, some things are going to have to change.
First, you have to understand that grownups who listen to podcasts generally do not listen on an iPod. We have made some progress integrating computer-listening features into podcasts. The Delicious playtagger supports this (as an aside, am I the only one who noticed that all of the Delicious buzz went stone silent as soon as Yahoo bought it?), as does the new play button in Feedburner feeds.
But there is another place where grownups listen to even more of their music, talk shows and audio books- in the car. Which leads me to my recipe for a killer podcast application.
Want to be famous and actually make some money too? Then create this-
An application, online or local, that allows a user to subscribe to podcasts and organize their subscription lists.
Allow them to listen to the podcasts online or to download them into an iPod.
Here comes the new and important part…
Create an easy to implement way to have selected podcasts automatically burned to a CD-R every week or so, with each podcast to be a separate track. After it is set up, the application would simply prompt the user to insert a CD-R every so often, at which time it would burn that week’s podcasts onto a CD-R that could be listened to in the car.
The application would also create a text document with the track numbers, names, dates and descriptions of the podcasts. That document could be printed and used as a listening reference. Label maker developers could write plug-ins that would allow the automatic printing of jewel case labels or, even better, templates for applications, like my Primera printer, that print on the CD-R itself.
Have the podcast name and date burned on the CD-R as CD Text.
Most car stereos can play MP3’s now, so that would be the default setting- for more capacity. But there would also be an option to burn the CD-R in CDA format so older car stereos could also play it. CD-R’s are almost free these days, so cost is not a factor.
Plus, the CD-R’s would allow the user to create an archive of podcasts and to share good ones with friends.
People would happily pay for this product. And if you wanted to be true to the Web 2.0 mantra and get some of the allegedly infinite ad revenue, you could place ads on the application pages, if it’s an online application, or on the CD-R between the podcasts themselves. Perhaps there would be a cheaper version of the application that has brief ads between the podcasts and a full-priced version that doesn’t.
I realize that you can burn podcasts to CD-R’s now, but it’s simply more trouble than most people are willing to go to for a concept they don’t fully understand or embrace. To get to where the population and the dollars are, you have to make it easy for people to say yes.
Let me say it again, the customers we are trying to sell to are not geeks like us. They want something that is (a) easy, and (b) cool and useful, but in that order. Too many Web 2.0 developers get it backwards. You have to make it easy to say yes, because it will always be easy to say no.
Take podcasting into the cars and trucks of the masses and you’ll see podcasting really take off.
Otherwise it’s just too easy to say no.
I tell my friends all the time how important it is to always back up their data. That to choose not to back up is to choose to lose data, and all that.
But yesterday, when I was making some changes to the left and right columns of my blog, I didn’t take the time to back up my current template before I made those changes. I am pretty good changing the html and scripts used to pull and display information, so I figured I’d be in and out in less than a half hour.
What I didn’t count on was the second half of my template page getting accidentally selected and deleted by mistake, along with those few lines I intended to delete. I still don’t know how it happened, and only realized it had happened when I went back to my blog later and there was nothing but random code on the page.
Big honking problem.
I have many old backups of my template, but none from the last few months. So I had to spend about 3 hours figuring out what was missing and rewriting the template. That is not a recipe for a relaxing Saturday afternoon. At least it was raining cats and dogs, so I wasn’t missing anything fun.
At the end of the day, my improvements were added. Here’s a summary of what I did and how I did it:
1) I added an automatically updating “recent links” list using Dave‘s advice given in a Comment to my WordPress Blues post. I tried that approach a year or so ago, and only got 3-4 links in the list. Technorati must have fixed it in the meantime, because now it seems to work reasonably well. One beauty of the blogosphere is that it allows you to have smart friends from all over the world who can help you out. Thanks Dave!
2) I added a tag cloud using ZoomClouds. It is easy to set up and configure (I had to make mine very narrow to fit in the column). The links lead to a page on the ZoomCloud site where the relevant portion of your RSS feed is displayed. I wish it linked to the actual blog post, but ZoomCloud has to pay the bills, so I can live with it the way it is.
3) I fixed my Last.fm plug-in to J. River’s Media Center (the best media player on the market, yet one that is ignored by many writers), so my playlist will appear on my Last.fm page. I also designed a weekly top artists chart, which I am not going to display all the time, but which I will post from time to time. Here’s how it looks:
4) I deleted all of the old feed buttons in favor of the standard one, and put it, my email subscription form and a new mobile feed via Plusmo at a better location, to encourage more visitors to subscribe. If you aren’t subscribed to Newsome.Org, how’s about clicking that little orange button over there?
5) After considering removing it altogether, I moved my Skype button to a less obvious place- below the fold. Anyone who ought to be Skyping me will know it’s there, and it will hopefully keep me from getting too many young, drunk and clueless calls.
6) I added an automatically updating list of people who recently Commented on my posts. Note that it isn’t the last 10 to Comment anywhere- it’s the last 10 to Comment on a post that is still on the front page. Not my preference, but that’s the way the system I found works.
The idea of a lot of the new features is to give people who link to me and Comment on my posts some instant and automatic return traffic. I am good about responding to people who link and Comment, but when I get busy or distracted, I don’t want links and Comments to go unrecognized. After all, blogging is about community and about back and forth.
Lastly, I updated my music and book lists. Many thanks to Donncha Caoimh, who recommended Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Exposure in a Comment. That is the most helpful photography book I have ever read. Bryan knows how to teach exposure. I just wish there were a few more photos of his extremely fine wife in that book. If you’re a guy and you’ve read it, you know what I mean.
Donncha is a fantastic photographer. Visit In Photos to see his amazing photography.
Back to backups. While I was finally able to get things back up and running with the new content in place, my failure to backup my data made a 30 minute job a 3 and a half hour job.
Do as I say, not as I (sometimes) do- go back up your data.
Newsome.Org 