Micro Persuasion recently wrote “Ten Blogging Hacks”, which isn’t a good title as the tools and techniques he offers are more tools and techniques rather than hacks, but it’s still worth exploring.
He recommends blogging with Writely, an online word processor which will also allow you to write blog posts and post them to Blogger, Moveable Type/TypePad, WordPress, and more. This allows you to spell check your posts. He also recommends working with ecto, a great desktop blogging application that has a lot of great features including automatic tagging, as well as tools for automatically posting your daily del.icio.us links, blogging from your cell phone, showing your location on a map, selling your blog “products”, and more fun you can have with your blogs.
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
Lorelle on WordPress 
9 Comments
Ok, I’m confused. If you’re gonna use writely then why not just type directly into the blog editor?
I looked at writely and it pointed me to Google’s Documents area. No thanks.
On this point, I had to agree. Firefox now comes with auto spell checking, so if your only reason to use Writely or other systems is to get the spell checking, why bother?
I do, however, agree that you should write your longer-than-two-paragraph posts in a text editor, with or without spell check, and copy and paste it into your blog’s editor as a click of the wrong button or your IP connection going down can lose a post you can never recover. WordPress.com blogs have an auto-save feature, but I’ve still lost work when something borked between the last save and hitting the save or publish button. So I’m paranoid about that kind of thing. I like having the backup.
That Micro Persuasion article is over a year old (check the date), which would explain the Writely->Google Docs issue.
Yes, but some of the tips are still valid, and a lot of people are still using this technique. Still, good point.
I love how some articles are timeless. 😉
Google Docs is pretty handy for those of us who do blog-work at the day-job on the sly … you usually need to hack around the resulting HTML in WordPress to get it perfect, but the regular autosaves mean that you can boss-close the window at necessary moments without worrying! The del.icio.us link dump feature is a must-have for me, as well.
I prefer Windows live writer than any other blog editor. The features are awesome and its much easier to play with HTML. I somehow hate the editor in wordpress. There are times where the whole formatting of my blog changes (like everything in italics) when there is some HTML code open!
Yeah, I’m hearing that. Using [hr /] is an utter no-no, which really sucks; doesn’t matter how many times you tweak the HTML editor, the save-and-continue-editing just screws everything up completely. Still, I can’t complain – WP is, in all other respects, the bomb (as the kids like to say these days).
Unfortunately some of the “hacks” won’t work on the blogger beta tech until it’s fixed.
The only blogging desktop application I have constantly used is Windows Live Writer. I first I used to post straight from there but first, it doesn’t have the “excerpt” option, and second, it wasn’t sending the tracbacks. These days I use it to prepare my blog posts. After writing the post, I switch to the code view and then copy/paste the content onto my WordPress control panel post page.
I also used the Performancing FireFox plugin but after a while it becomes too slow — at least it used to, I don’t know about now.
I’m yet to see a good blogging application, online or desktop.