I’ve been using the Beta of Windows Live Writer for blogging recently, and it works great. However, now that I’m a Vista/Office 2007 convert, I see no reason to use this tool when Word 2007 has blogging tools built in.

The big problem for the last few weeks has been Word 2007 doesn’t support the DasBlog engine. All Google searches led me to this conclusion. But, I finally got it working with images! It’s not as straight forward as using WLW, but here is how it’s done:

1. Open Word 2007 and select Blog Post.
2. Open the Manage Accounts button in the Blog section of the toolbar. And click “New”.
3. Under Blog Account, select “Other” and then click “Next”.
4. For the API, select MetaWebLog. For the URL, use your domain plus blogger.aspx. The Account information is your normal blogger login and password.

   

For Picture Options, use an FTP account as “My Own Server”. You will have to set this up as you did with WLW. You could put your username and password in the FTP url, otherwise you will be prompted for it the first time you post.

Now you should be able to post from Word 2007.

Last night I finished reading BlogWild! How everyone can go blogging by Andy Wibbels. This book wasn’t bad if you know absolutely nothing about blogs or blogging. I had read some good reviews of the book, but found it very simplistic.

I found a little bit of information that would help someone with their existing blog (about enough info to fit in an article) but a lot of stuff that told you how to set up a Typepad blog from scratch.

As someone in the IT industry, it wasn’t really meant for me. If I wanted my grandmother to be able to blog, I would recommend this book to her. Actually, in the last place I worked, I know some very technical people who didn’t know what a blog was or have ever read one.

Too much reliance on Typepad for my liking.

Andy Wibbels has two blogs which are very successful. I found them very entertaining and have added the RSS feeds to my aggregator. The blogs are at:

http://andywibbels.com/

http://www.andymatic.com/

Still, it got me motivated to write a bit more and to think about more information to include on this site. If nothing else, that was a benefit to reading it.

So, I’ve played around with the new Windows Live Writer for offline blogging and find the tool to be really cool. I’ve migrated the entire blog to the dasBlog engine just I could use this tool.

A few weeks ago, I started moving everything over to DotNetNuke, but man did that suck. I wanted to get out of the PHP arena and fully into .net.

So, as I reviewed some of the old posts, I removed some and added some more that went to other sites. Since the posted date doesn’t seem to work on the WLW tool, I put “Originally posted” at the top of each post.

If anyone is reading this, this is why everything was posted on one day.

dasBlog works great by the way. Once you get around the configuration, it’s much better than a lot of other tools. No database hits either.