Saturday, February 13, 2016

Open Live Writer – we will (eventually) get through this

I could blame the significantly reduced GSD blog posting on competing time drains of late:

  • Downton Abbey on PBS
  • Friday Night Curling televised matches
  • Sysadmin work at the church-house
  • Deep-dive problem solving for some pernicious Windows issues
  • Multiple projects at work
  • Tech-fatigue
  • Providing more quality time to family and friends

All of those do compete quite strongly with my blogging time.

However after considerable reflection, I must put the greatest challenge against the shut-down of the Microsoft Live Writer application (via the Google blogger API changes) and the painful switch to Open Live Writer.

For some background: Windows Live Writer Goes Open - Hurray - WLW breaks - Booo! – GSD blog post

That particular “break” was quickly fixed over the holidays when version 0.5.1.4 was released.

Before anything else, let me say that I deeply appreciate and am humbly grateful to the developers volunteering their time to get Open Live Writer dialed in.

But when I get the urge to compose a blog post, my current enthusiasm drops.

Here is my current process.

  1. Go into the bookmarked topic hopper and pick the post’s subject/theme.
  2. Launch Open Live Writer (OLW).
  3. Compose my post.
  4. Copy all my content and past it into Notepad++ Home in which I’ve…
    1. added spell check functionality
    2. via http://aspell.net/win32/
  5. Run the spell checker and then fix the spelling issues back in OLW.
  6. Add tags to the post by…
    1. opening up my blog home page
    2. reviewing my tags in the side-bar
    3. typing them in manually in the tag bar in OLW
  7. Publish the post to Blogger

It’s not that bad, but the original WLW had built-in spell-checking and was able to download and provide me a pick-list of my blog post tags automatically.

Note, Scott Lovegrove has offered a (temporary) build version that seems to support Blogger categories.

I’ll try it soon on my “non-production” home system and post an update.

It looks to be ready for inclusion in the next release version – whenever that will be. Current release version as of the time of this blog post is 0.5.1.4.

Is this process a deal-breaker…of course not, but the steps required have kinda taken some of the free-form blogging away and made it a more deliberate exercise.  That could be a Good Thing ™ but it does take away the spontaneity from the process.

Likewise, it seems that the OLW team already has plans to integrate spell-checking in the next release version also.

Open Live Writer “Watch List”

So I will need to work on gaining confidence again in my blogging process and embrace it until these minor application issues can be addressed in an upcoming release.

Cheers.

--Claus Valca

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