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.
- Go into the bookmarked topic hopper and pick the post’s subject/theme.
- Launch Open Live Writer (OLW).
- Compose my post.
- Copy all my content and past it into Notepad++ Home in which I’ve…
- Run the spell checker and then fix the spelling issues back in OLW.
- Add tags to the post by…
- opening up my blog home page
- reviewing my tags in the side-bar
- typing them in manually in the tag bar in OLW
- 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.
- 214# issuecomment –166945271 · Issue #214 · OpenLiveWriter · GitHub
- OpenLiveWriter – AppVeyor
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.
- Support Blogger categories by ScottIsAFool · Pull Request #234 · OpenLiveWriter · GitHub
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”
- Open Issues · OpenLiveWriter · GitHub
- Closed Issues · OpenLiveWriter · GitHub
- Blog – Open Live Writer
- News – Open Live Writer
- Does OpenLiveWriter automatically update? (yes) – Open Live Writer
- How can I uninstall completely Open Source Live Writer? · Issue #251 · OpenLiveWriter · GitHub
- Open Live Writer – Main page
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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