shahine.com/omar/

Too many people wrote about writer today for me to link to any of them .

I started using Writer as soon as the internal beta started. I was so very surprised and excited when I first used it. For one thing I had no idea we were working on a blogging app (other than Word 2007) but this one will be better than Word IMHO because it's so well targeted at blogging as a scenario. The only thing I'll miss from word is the excellent contextual spelling support in 2007.

If anyone was watching the dasBlog checkins I've been making they would have noticed two things.

1. RSD Support. This makes it so that you can simply point the blogging application at your site URL and the software automatically configures itself for your blog. Easy as pie.
2. MetaWeblog.newMediaObject. This makes it so that you can attach images to your post without having to remember how FTP paths work. Basically dasBlog and the blogging application do all the heavy lifting for you. While I didn't actually check in this support for dasBlog, I fixed a few bugs to make it work with Writer.

Both of these will be in dasBlog 1.9. Those two features alone were enough for me to stop using BlogJet. The features below were icing on the cake.

Anyway, Back to writer. There are a few things I love about it.

1. I love how it handles Drafts. You just close the window and it autosaves, You can keep a long list of draft items (I like to treat my drafts as todo's for blog posts). All the draft UI is handled seamlessly in the application.
2. It's awesome to be able to preview your post using the CSS of your blog. Very innovative.
3. Inserting Pictures is fun and easy. I like the border and drop shadow effects.
4. Love the insert Map
5. Come to think of it, I love the fact that there is an API. I wrote two plugins already .

Here is a screen shot of my first plugin, Insert Code that uses the excellent CSharpFormat. It will pretty print your code with a few options.

And here is a screen shot of my 2nd plugin, Insert SmugMug Image (for my favorite photo site, SmugMug). This plugin will allow you to insert a photo from your SmugMug gallery.

I hope to get both of these available for download in the next few days (no promises).

Writer is going to be a great successful product. You can just tell by how excited the team is about their product, and how responsive they were to the internal dogfood/beta community.

Who knew that while I wasn't paying attention, the mess of configuring blogging software was solved.

"Really Simple Discovery is a way to help client software find the services needed to read, edit, or "work with" weblogging software. Although I talk about weblogging software, there's no reason this format can't apply to other forms of web client/system software that I wasn't considering, or may not even exist as of this writing. (There is an example below where I did just that.) This format is simple but flexible. One of the deisgn goals was to ensure that it would be human writeable. This was my "test" for ensuring that the format was easy for everyone to implement. "

Anyway, I've just checked this into dasBlog, and it should be part of 1.9 when we release that (no eta yet).

Thanks goes to Daniel Berlinger for taking the initiative and coming up with a reall simple solution to a long standing problem .

If you can read this post, then Word 2007 can successfully post to dasBlog. Why do I love this? Cause I hate the spell checker in every other applications (including BlogJet). Office has hands down the best proofing tools out there (and we use them in Windows Live Mail as well).

BTW – I’m currently on vacation. Right now I’m on Fripp Island in South Carolina attending a wedding. Earlier this week Lora and I spent time in Charleston, SC and Washington, DC.

update: looks like Word is passing in the dateTime in this format:

<member><name>dateCreated</name><value><dateTime.iso8601>2006-05-13T14:59:40Z</dateTime.iso8601></value></member>

Which dasBlog doesn't like. The format should be:

20060513T14:59:40

Well, the world seems to be moving forward. We no longer have to use such geeky terms as RSS and Atom. Products such as IE 7, FireFox, MSN Spaces, live.com etc are all using the terminology: Feed and Subscribe to Feed. I figured this was a good time to go through and fix up dasBlog to align with the new direction.

In the next update, dasBlog templates all display a single feed icon from http://www.feedicons.com. The icon links to your site's RSS 2.0 document using the FEED URI.

What does that mean for Atom? Still there. CDF? Still there... but who cares really. Aggregtors support both Atom and RSS and the dasBlog RSS 2.0 feed is more "feature rich" than the Atom feed. Anyway, subscribing to one vs the other has Zero material impact on your aggregator.

So, in this brave new world the user should not have to care. When they visit your dasBlog site using IE 7 or FireFox the browsers alert the user that this site has a Feed using the feed icon. If you click the Feed icon that appears on the web site it will launch your default aggregator and subscribe to the feed.

Clemens Vasters just announced that he'll be joining Microsoft. For those of you that don't know, Clemens is the "papa" of dasBlog. There is an eweek story covering the announcement. I'm sure he is excited, but Microsoft is very lucky to have him.