Jun 26, 2006 | blog
Now, I’ve subscribed to Scoble’s blog for almost 2 years or so and I really enjoy his writing style and much of what he has to say. Though in the past few days he’s written a few posts I need to comment on.
Maybe it’s because I took the weekend off to spend with the family and reading about three days posts just gets me more motivated to address some things. Keep in mind, I’m not upset with Robert, and I’m certainly not about to stop reading his blog! So I’ll start with the newest and work my way back – it won’t take long, it’s only a few posts:
- Inside new Sharepoint’s RSS, blogs, and wikis – Thanks for the information! I’ve been following the SharePoint product for the past 2-3 years and am very excited for new details on what’s going on. My hope is to have SharePoint brought inside my employer in the next year or so – its just too powerful a platform not to implement. The nice part is that many business and IT leaders are starting to find the usefulness of the product. The only reason it didn’t make it in the door in 2004 was because of restore options for the database – just not flexible enough. One simple question, and when Microsoft and their partners said “well, not in this version” and couldn’t put a timeline on the request – talks dissolved on the project. We’ll see where they’re at now.
- Has Microsoft changed? WinFS post getting questioned internally – Hmmm, I’ve had similar thoughts and wonder a number of things. Is WinFS as the “Windows Future Storage” really gone? Does it matter? As our Web 2.0-centric world spins faster and faster – with better broadband and wireless connections, does it matter for a local relational file system? If all our data is stored online, and most of our apps are web-based, what is the usefulness of a WinFS type subsystem – heck what’s the use of a fat client? Did Bill Gates just let all his pet projects whither as he left for “summer vacation” as Robert puts it? Does Bill care? Was WinFS a pet project? Humph!
- Dear Al Gore: here’s some inconvenient truths – Now I have to admit up front that I am not fond of the former V.P. and that I have not read his book or watched his movie. It’s my opinion that his current media attention is simply targeted at his 2008 run for President – ’nuff said on that. What I will say on this one is that I agree with Robert that our society has several self-induced issues facing it in the next many years, the environment is hardly one of them. Yes, we all could work better at conserving energy in the instances that Robert mentions – and more. The real challenges that we face are the re-writing of history to meet currently desired interpretations, lack of integrity & objectivity in the drive-by media, rejection of traditional cultural norms, and unwillingness to find the middle ground in the political arena.
One thing I’ve noticed about Robert’s blog in recent months is that he really has taken it back as a personal blog instead of the Microsoft PR outlet that it had a tendency to sound like. Now I know I’m on the opposite political fence from Robert, but I do appreciate his open discussion.
On a side note Robert, I do hope the move goes well, with as little issue as possible!
Jun 19, 2006 | blog
Ugh… There has been a bit of discussion on blog design lately, and I’ll admit that its not easy. I’ve been working on getting two new blogs ready for launch and the layout, design scheme, etc… is the hardest part.
Yes I will eventually hire a professional to give them an overhaul sometime in the future, but the sites will have to pay for that themselves, right now I need to create a compelling design on my own. Now keep in mind that I’m at heart a computer geek – a Windows computer geek – and you get the idea of how easy a time I’m having. 🙂
So in addition to learning a little about Linux, some about MySQL, a bit more on PHP, and quite a bit on WordPress. I now need to really get to understand color combinations, graphic elements and the like. Of course the technical aspects of all this makes complete sense, but the technical part is only one of many aspects of blog (and web) design.
For this site, I’ve stuck with a freeware template that I found out on the ‘net, and I’m fairly happy with it. I’ll update the design on this site sometime in the near future, and it’ll probably be my main experimental site for design experimentation and learning.
I must say thank-you to Chris Pearson for a recent post on the topic of web design pricing – it was a real eye opener. I understand completely because every job has its complexities, and that is why we hire professionals – so things come out looking right!
Jun 14, 2006 | blog
Ok, thought I’d give a quick update on where I’m at using OneNote as a blogging tool, and I’ll try to keep it short.
ITS GREAT!
So I was able to follow Chris Pratley’s workaround (look at the bottom of the post) to get blogging through Word to work. And it does! Here are the steps I do have to go thru:
Simply highlight what you want to post, right-click and select “Blog This”. OneNote then shoots the selection over to Word and uses the blog template that ships with Beta2.
Edit the post if needed, and then I publish the post as a draft to my blog.
Once the draft post is on my blog, I can log in and make sure the formatting is correct, select the categories I want for the post, and add the
Technorati tags.
Finally I correct the date for the post since Word currently generates an incorrect date.
Publish post
So that’s it! Yes there are a few steps to the process, but being able to use OneNote as the creation tool is simply incredible.
Jun 13, 2006 | blog
Ok, maybe I was a little quick to dismiss OneNote as a blogging tool. My issue is with the ability to post directly from OneNote something it does not do currently and not with the software itself.
As Chris Pratley noted in a post on his blog, you can use a workaround to post to a blog through Word 2007. Interesting…
Well, Im going to keep using OneNote as a post creation tool, mainly because its great for saving quick notes, ideas and stuff for each post. Once the post is created, Ill do something like copy to w.bloggar to post to my blog.
The combination of Word & OneNote 2007 has huge potential for bloggers, and I hope that the functionality is fleshed out a bit more. To that end, Im going to post a list of feature requests for Word & OneNote specifically for bloggers.
Jun 12, 2006 | blog
I’ve been looking for better tools to write, manage, and post to my blog lately – and I’m still looking. The freebie tools are interesting, but are not working that well for me. w.bloggar is about the best one for post creation, and it lets me save posts as files on my PC, so I could manage them in a set of folders prior to posting.
Writely is another tool I’ve been using to write & manage, but not to post. I had been posting directly from Writely, but it soon started to display this ugly skill of skewering my blog layout. The first time I thought it was something I did and it took me about 2 days to track it down, then I wised up.
So this past week I started trying to use Microsoft’s OneNote 2003/2007 as my blog post manager. While it does not have the ability to post directly to a blog, it seemed to be a great way to organize by folders, tabs, and pages all the research, pictures, links, and posts for my blog.
While OneNote is great at doing exactly the thing I was hoping for – organizing & managing the research and post creation – it failed at the most simply thing. Or at least Windows did – Copy & Paste.
When I copied the post text and pasted it into WordPress, the full HTML formatting followed the text. Now maybe I’m being stupid again (shh…), and there is a simple way in Windows/Office/OneNote to copy only the text – like when you paste in most Office apps, you can choose unformatted text as an option. If there is will someone point that out to this slow IT guy? 🙂
If I can get past the copy & paste issue, I’ll be using OneNote full time. I’m about ready to try and request the product at work, it is that helpful to the way I work. Being able to combine all forms of digital information into one page is huge – makes me want to get a Tablet PC ;).
