Blogging Tips

Blogger in draft and Windows Live Writer

After the introduction of the new Blogger in draft, I would like to share my thoughts about it. While the new interface is quite interesting and complete there are a few things that are still not working as expected. At the same time there are few information on workarounds, tricks and tips. Personally I’ve contacted Google directly with my feedback and I will see what they will do about it.
What are the problems? Well, I’ve just noticed one thing that makes me quite unhappy: in the old Blogger in draft there was the possibility to directly edit the blog template through Design/Edit HTML. Now it seems that the feature is gone. I believe that’s a limitation I could accept for the moment, however most of the tricks and solution to Blogger issues are related to the direct edit of template. Are those solution now gone for good? We will see…
Another issue is related to post editing. And this is bad, specifically for a blog like The Web Thought. Basically inserting snippets example, I use html tags like:

<div>this is a div</div>

The above box is what I use to highlight code portions. Usually I write the post using the “compose” view. After writing all the post, I check the “HTML” view for small problems. With the new Blogger in draft, every time you switch between the two views, the text formatting gets messed up. In addition to that, if you insert an HTML tag (like a did above), the tag is interpreted. Just to replicate the issue, if you insert <zzz> in the post body and switch to HTM view, you will see the text interpreted as <zzz></zzz> and obviously gone in the “compose” view.
That is a big problem, as I write a lot of code.

We have to wait and see if Google finds a solution to the issue. I definitely can’t use the post editor that way. It’s an awful waste of time, and frankly  I have to check the text formatting more than once, just to be sure you see the post the way I wanted. And talking about it, I do apologize if the recent post are not properly formatted.
Another viable solution is to use Windows Live Writer.  The Microsoft software lets you compose post in a simple and effective way, it can connect to the blog, it retrieves old posts for editing, and it has everything you might need for post publishing. I actually have written this very article with it. The first impression is positive, but I would like to test it further and see how it goes.

Another solution is to remove the check near the "Make Blogger in Draft my defaul" and get back to  http://blogger.com/home
 
I will keep you posted on new findings.