Microsoft makes good stuff?

Published: April 21st, 2010 | 0 Comments

I’m writing this post using Windows Live Writer which is actually a pretty nifty piece of software to blog with.

It neatly detected my blog (given just the URL) and with my username and password, it happily downloaded the theme from the blog, so that I get a preview of what my post will look like as I create it. Even WordPress doesn’t do that yet although that will change in WordPress 3.0 (at least for the new default theme.) Your blog will need to support XML-RPC or Atom publishing to do this kind of cool stuff though.

What’s also cool is that the interface is blog-agnostic. I could be using it to post to a Blogger blog, a WordPress blog, LiveJournal or TypePad, not to mention Microsoft’s own Live Spaces and Sharepoint blogs.

What I’d really love though is for there to be an add-on for Firefox or an extension for Chrome, so that I could quickly open Windows Live Writer after selecting an excerpt or an image on a web-page or link. If I was using Internet Explorer, I could use the Live toolbar to hook into Live Writer, but no way I’m using that browser or another toolbar. I like my vertical space! 🙂

P.S. Almost 4 years ago, I had blogged about a Firefox add-on called Performancing which did just that. Sadly, the Performancing add-on seems to have died soon after and the site itself is now some sort of blog consultancy service.

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Change

Published: April 10th, 2010 | 0 Comments

I had to do some shifting around with my hosting, so I thought I might as well make some long overdue changes too.

I got rid of the WordPressMU installation I was using. Of course with the upcoming 3.0 release of WordPress, that shouldn’t matter because they’re merging the codebases.

I merged the science and tech blogs that resided under a subdomain into this one. It meant I had to delete a couple of posts written by collaborators but that doesn’t matter since the whole collaboration experiment failed. I guess all of us were too busy to actually post here frequently.

The other big change I made was to move what used to be my anonymous personal blog that I’d been writing since 2003 into its own WordPress installation under a folder here. I had begun that blog on Blogger in August 2003 when I was still living in the US and back when Blogger didn’t have commenting! It was fun to go back and read some of my posts again, brought a few memories rushing back. I don’t plan to post there anymore, it’s now just an archive at http://absolutegeeky.com/oook

I’m still going to add a few more bells and whistles to this blog here and maybe I’d also post more often, I dunno. For now, the best place to find me usually is on Twitter or Facebook.

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