Philosophlogically Speaking…

I’m using Word 2007 to create this post. I was actually starting to create a new document and I figured I would try creating a new blog post to see how it works.

I was first presented with this dialog to register my blog:

I selected Wordpress from the list and saw this dialog:

I put in my blog (http://nathandewitt.net/blog/xmlrpc.php) and entered my account information. I clicked OK and presto changeo I was done.

Next I entered my title:

Then I clicked on the Insert Category. It reconnected to my blog to download my Categories, and then I selected Meta from the dropdown list.

I’m going to play around with some of the Word 2007 features to see how it handles them:

An Equation:

Word Art:

Some Code:

				private
				SPListItemCollection nominated(SPList calendarList)

        {

				SPQuery query = new
				SPQuery();

            query.ViewAttributes = "Scope=\"Recursive\"";

            query.Query = "<Where>" +

				"<Eq>" +

				"<FieldRef Name=\"" + nominateField + "\" />" +

				"<Value Type=\"bit\">1</Value>" +

				"</Eq>" +

				"</Where>";

				return calendarList.GetItems(query);

        }

Finally, I typed everything up and clicked Publish. It seems pretty straight-forward.

Pros:

• Simple to get up and running
• Handles styles decently
• Images get uploaded and stored without hassle
• It’s nice to work in the familiar environment of Word
• Making changes just involves publishing again

Cons:

• Equations don’t get converted to PNG or anything, they just vanish
• Difficult to predict formatting, had to put each picture’s text wrapping properties to Top & Bottom
• Word Art images have white background
• The code gets messed up – coloring is fine but each line is a separate paragraph

Conclusion:

This was easy to get going, but I’m not pleased with the embedding of other items (pictures, equations, code). This is a great solution for just writing a typical blog entry without a lot of pictures or style changes. Maybe I’ll use this more for blogging longer essays. I think I’ll stick with handcoding the HTML for now.