Sunday, September 03, 2006

Post Composers

Hello All,

I have been lurking for a little while and finally have taken interest in beating my blog into some form of my idea. Thank goodness my husband has volunteered to do anything HTML related.

I am frustrated by composting my posts in Bloggers composition area. I tried the Qumana. I liked it some but the photos would not attach for me. Right now I am writing my posts in Word and then transfering them. This is ok but I have to manually transfer any links I have put into the post. Is there a better method or program? I like the posting ability from Picassa except it did not transfer my template for truncating posts plus it is a glorified Blogger composer.

I think because of this frustration I hate the way my recipes look. Hopefully ya'll can help me and I get focus on telling my husband what kind of code I want.

Thanks in advance


This Post was written by Chrispy from Experimentation of Taste

8 comments:

Amy Sherman said...

What exactly don't you like about composing in Blogger? Is it the writing, creating links, adding photos? Using MS Word can be tricky, when I try I usually end up with lots of unintended symbols and marks I have to remove later.

Kalyn Denny said...

I was going to ask just what Amy asked, what is it about composing in blogger that you're having trouble with? I don't find it that difficult to use except sometimes the preview doesn't exactly show how the post is going to look. Maybe I've just gotten used to it.

chrispy said...

I am horrible at spelling from living in so many countries growing up. I like the ease of just using Word to write in since that is what I have done for so many years and I know all the hotkey codes to change format without leaving the keyboard.

The photo adding frustrates me. And the limited formating options. It never looks right when I am done. I have to repost a entry 2 - 3 sometimes 10 times before the stupid thing looks halfway the way I told it to be.

Amy Sherman said...

A couple things--use the spell check that's in Blogger. It's not as good as the one in MS Word but it's not bad. Also use the preview button to see what your post will look like before you post it. Finally I use a html "cheat sheet" because I can never remember any code, here's the link:
http://www.webmonkey.com/reference/html_cheatsheet/

Marc said...

It doesn't have a WSIWYG mode, but NoteTab Light from Fookes Software (available for free from download.com) is a useful tool for writing intial drafts. It has various toolbars which provide shortcuts to common actions. The HTML one, for example, contains a "hyperlink" item, that makes linking easy: just highlight the word(s) you want to be the link, double click hyperlink (or ctrl-space if it's already selected), then paste in the URL of the target. There are many, many tools inside the program, and so there might be spellcheckers and html preview options.

download.com is worth checking for other html editors. I'm sure there are some good shareware ones out there.

David said...

Amy: You may need to convert your text to ASCI, by using a program like Text Wrangler (which I have to do.)

It's one more step, but may save you the trouble of coverting symbols. You can download it here.

Amy Sherman said...

Actually I compose in TextEdit which works great! (Mac only though)

chrispy said...

Just so all you know the result. I ended up looking through the archives for an answer and saw a post by Kayln of Kayln's Kitchen with a link at the bottom. It was stating that the post had been composed using Performancing. It is a firefox extension. I really enjoy how I can be surfing and writting at the same time and it transfer stuff beautifully from Word with all formatting in tact.

I have learned to deal with some other formatting issues that preview does not help.

Thanks for trying to help all.