Since I'm new to this blogging thing, it has taken me awhile to figure out what tools to use to make writing and publishing posts easy to do. After reading what others have to say on the topic, and talking to my co-workers at SRT, I have hit upon Windows Live Writer with the Code Snippet plugin. But it hasn't been straightforward getting these tools to cooperate with Community Server 2007.1, the server SRT uses for blogs. Here are two tricks to make things work right.
Windows Live Writer makes writing a post and including things such as images and videos and bits of code very easy. One of the big advantages is that it can go to your blog site and grab your template, so that as you compose your post you can see just what it will look like when it is published. I could have used that feature when I wrote my last post on ZedGraph and made the images too wide for the main text column. To get the template, WLW creates a temporary post, publishes it to the server, then goes to that post and downloads the CSS. Seems straightforward...except that it failed the first and second and third and fourth times I asked it to do this. Then I went searching for a solution. What I figured out is that in Community Server Dashboard, under Global Settings -> Default Post Settings, there is an option called "Auto Name Posts". If set to "Yes", CS tries to name each post based on the title, rather than use the de facto standard blog post naming convention, which is based on the date the post was created. After I disabled this option, WLW successfully located its post and downloaded my template to my local machine. Success!
My second problem that I've been struggling with is coming up with a quick and easy way to insert formatted, colored code into posts. Before I had WLW, I would cut and paste code and then go and manually add <div> and <span> tags with with embedded CSS styles using the horrible Community Server interface with the TinyMCE editor. Death seemed preferable. If I specified colors like this:
<span style="color: blue;">
things worked just fine. I would get blue text. But if instead I specified:
<span style="color: #0000FF;">
then the TinyMCE editor would modify the tag to look like this:
<span style="color: rgb(0,0,255);">, which would then turn into:
<span>
by the time it was published. I would not get blue text. Argh!
By using WLW with the Code Snippet plugin, as long as I never open up the post in the TinyMCE editor before it's published, everything is fine and my span tags with their color styles are left untouched. Stay away from TinyMCE!
I haven't worked out all of my blog problems just yet. For instance, Code Snippet supports C# code, but not Matlab. But I got two big problems solved, so I will declare success for the moment.