Gavin’s Digital Diner

It’s a cold, windy Saturday so I decided to check out the rumor that one could blog directly from the new version of Word (Office 2007). Since I’ve been putting stuff up on the Digital Diner, I’ve discovered the following:

1. Typing these things online is a drag.
2. Cutting and pasting them from Word seems to include more non-standard HTML code (hidden in the word document) that seems rational
3. Drafting and editing in Wordpad or Notepad just ain’t much fun
4. Frontpage seemed to be overkill (and ain’t much fun either)
5. Assembling all the pictures and stuff was tedious

So.. if I could just draft, assemble the clip art, and post… well that certainly would be nice. Now if only the rumors were true…

So, I pushed some buttons, clicked some menus, and it appears to be true. Not to be daunted by the seemingly obscure or difficult, I figured I’d try doing a post on how to use Word 2007 with Typepad. This is the result. If you’re reading it, it worked. If you’re reading it, not only is it true, but it’s damn easy. The only tricky part was filling out the details of the blog account with Typepad (since Typepad is not one of the listed options).

Here’s how:

Click the big “Office Button” and choose Publish, Blog from the menus:

That gets you to a set of dialog windows where you get to setup Typepad as your service provider.

Since Typepad is not listed, I chose “other.” Then I got a window that asked for various pieces of information. My username and password were easy (I long ago figured out a set of standard mnemonic tricks that lets me remember various passwords). The API and the Blog Post URL took a trip to the Typepad Knowledge base. Suffice it to say you want to select “MetaWebLog” as the API (from the dropdown) and then enter the following URL: Http://www.typepad.com/api.

Finally, you’re asked about Picture Options – There were three options, so I chose the one that sounded logical, i.e., “My Blog Provider.”… We’ll see if it works.

Once you’re all registered and the like, you just draft the post, finalize, stick in the art, etc, and push the “publish” button. That’s easy.

Post Posting Postscript:

So, I pushed the buttons – a window opened and said “Contacting blog provider” and about 30 seconds later it was done; looking just the way it should. Just to live dangerously, I even tried correcting a small typo (and adding this postscript). Not a problem. It didn’t create a duplicate (like I feared it might), it just updated.

I now note that the ribbon bar has an option to “open existing” … does this mean I can edit previous posts. The only thing that seemed to not work was the Tagging. The “Insert Category” button did not provide a list of existing category tags – just the option to type one in or pick from a drop-down list that only had one option (the word “none”). Hey, I can live with that.

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