Tools that work: OpenOffice as a blog writing tool

Syndicated

This is a version of my earlier post, made to the short-lived "Tools that work" blog.

As my first contribution to the Tools That Work blog, why not present a tool to make the process of writing a blog post easier: t he Sun Weblog Publisher for OpenOffice. I still prefer to write text in a word processor, with the best tools for spell-checking, the simplest ways to add links, and Zotero to manage references to sites and literature.


Uploading a post as draft to a blog

But then the text needs to go into the blog: copy-pasting creates endless battles with an online “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Guess) editor, reformatting lists and headers, or losing carefully crafted sentences through browser hick-ups and poor form handling.

Editing the HTML itself isn’t fun either. OpenOffice produces poor HTML output, “Export as” even worse than “Save as”. An unappealing alternative: coding HTML in a text editor, adding things like by hand. I’ve looked at HTML editors that would let me focus on writing instead of coding. KompoZer (follow-up to Nvu) is nice for producing reasonable HTML, but yet another tool and not really supporting the writing process. And it then still is an effort to get the proper part of the HTML into the blog.

I also tried ScribeFire, which lets you write a blog post and interact with the blog software from within Firefox, but it offers no simple way for simple structural mark-up like a

header. And, no support for references.

The Sun Weblog Publisher extension for OpenOffice seems to change the way I work: it adds a button to publish a document to a blog, using a variety of protocols to support different blog software, like WordPress. And another button lets you download existing posts from that blog, to edit them. The process of pushing a post into the blog has become a lot smoother.


Upload and download posts from a blog

There is still some online processing to do, like adding tags and minor HTML cleanup. And I’m not sure how well it will handle images or complex layouts. But writing a post and pushing it into the blog has become a lot easier!

Edit