Ok, I'm giving this another shot: another Blog publishing tool. Personally I prefer writing posts in Word and pasting them but while the results look good, they're often a bitch to paste code from.

The problem with tools like this are that they rely on the flakey Web Browser control for its HTML interface. It's OK if you just type your messages as plain text, but it becomes a real nightmare if you need to paste code. Unless you use some of the various plug in tools or macros that turn your code into HTML first which you can then paste into your blog entry.

I often have code coming from many different places and Word is nice about this as it understands RTF and HTML and can deal with all of this stuff consistently. The HTML control - not so much.

Looks like writer simply turns RTF text into plain unformatted text which loses all of its indentation. That's hardly any more appealing.

Sure you can use third party tools to paste your code but even that doesn't seem to work too well. I can't seem to get the code to paste properly.

I also fired up Word 2007 and tried out it's Blog publishing functionality and it wouldn't work with MetaBlogAPI,  so that's not going to work at that moment. Bummer. This looks like it might be the easiest way to deal with posts out of Word.

The other major issue I have is that most of the blog API's don't support abstract creation unless I'm missing something. MetaBlogAPI doesn't have any support for abstracts. I suppose I can put some code together that autogenerates an abstract from the post if none is provided, but I actually like the idea of creating a separate abstract for the various list pages. Oh well... nice try.

I guess I'm back to just using Word as is.