Start blogging experience

Conclusion

To be done!!

Vision.

A month later! And a lot of adrenalin and frustration… I will try to save you all my troubles and just tell you what to do and why.

My vision was and is:

1. I want to blog, and I want to do it to reach more than Swedish talking people.
2. I want to be effective, using the right tools to make it happen.
3. I need to use screenshots pics in my blog.
4. I want my blog to have inspiring picture to make my boring text more interesting.
5. I want it to be found and hopefully read and inspiring.
6. I would like to see that I manage to reach out…

And that is about all… I think my vision could be shared by many, i.e. nothing strange at all. Though I had to invest a month to get going, my personal problem maybe…..

Reality – client tool.

I have tried three popular blog-places: Blogspot, MS Live and Wordpress. After a long evaluation period I have made up my mind about what I hope is my optimal blog strategy. I will use all of them! If that is a correct decision, I DON'T KNOW!

I will use Word 2007 to create all posts. The primary reasons being: It is an editor where I feel comfortable, all other I have tried have got me feel inconvenient. I would like to have WYSIWYG and I need good spellchecking support. The standard tools offered at any of the three above mention places are good, but not good enough. They all offer a tiny spot in an IE window where I could enter my thoughts.

This is the interface in BlogSpot (Google).

This is the offer from Live Space (MS).

This is Wordpress window for entering thoughts.

A Word 2007 tool seems appealing… My choices are space, spellchecking but no WSIWYG unfortunately.

The interface of client tool MS Live Writer 1.0 (beta)

Life Space has no spellchecking what so ever. Blogspot and Wordpress offers insulting spellchecking, you have a tool to active when you like that tells you what it think is wrong. I want to know the correct spelling I don't want to be insulted!! Live Writer is far much better, a tool you active that give you suggestion, like MS Word ten years ago. The polite way of telling that I think is unique for MS Office, telling you right away when you type. There is just one choice!! What so ever if you need spellchecking like I do. I could of course use Word for spellchecking and then past it in the silly window offered, but then I will miss the features of pictures inserted into the text.

What makes MS Live Writer great is the possibility to view your post and what it will look like. For both Wordpress and Blogspot you get a nice way 99% WYSIWYG, but for MS Live Spaces it misses…

My other big issue has been good support for screenshots and nice photos so you won't get bored. After much consideration I think for my purposes I have better store the picture files on my own FTP-site. If I ask Word 2007 to handle the pictures for me, I could do but often it will either fail or recopy them so I get thousands of copies of the same picture, which happens if I do a republish a lot of times. If I have had a descent prewiew before publishing I would not have needed to publish…..