After upgrading DasBlog to the latest release and setting up FeedBurner I felt that I needed to do something to improve my posting experience. Since inception I've been using the built-in rich text web form in DasBlog. However good it may be it still lacks in a few areas:
- No real-time spell checking. Since FireFox 2.0 came out this hasn't been an issue since it includes a very nice spell checker.
- Code formatting. For the life of me, I cannot get code formatting to respect my tab spacing. It parses the code just fine, but after it gets inserted into the post text area all the tabbing is gone. This last point has really frustrated me and kept me from posting code as often.
- No offline mode. Yeah I know, that's a bit much to ask of a web product, although Google seems to have found away around this with their Google Gears, which allows me to use the Google Reader in offline mode.
All of these issues have led down the path to Windows Live Writer, which is what I'm using right now to write this post. The thing that amazed me about both DasBlog and Windows Live Writer, is that installing and configuring Windows Live Writer just worked. There was no oeed to read any instruction manual or otherwise research how to set this up. It just worked.
The other thing that impressed me was that it has a web preview mode which allows me to actually see this post as would appear on my blog - and I mean exactly as it would appear on my blog. It basically has a complete cache of my blog home page, even when disconnected from the inter-web, which is really nice and unexpected. In Google terms, that feature "delighted" me.
As for code, lets see if I can cut and paste from Visual Studio...
/// <summary>
/// Converts a local DateTime instance to the MiniTix date time format.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// ISO 8601 date format in Zulu time.
/// </remarks>
/// <param name="date">The date.</param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static string ToMiniTixDateTimeFormat(DateTime date)
{
return date.ToUniversalTime().ToString("u");
}
Darn, that didn't quite work did it? Fortunately I noticed Windows Live Writer has a plugin feature. Google search... Found a code formatter plugin right away on CodePlex! Lets see how the new plugin works. Exception, Directory not found! OK that didn't work, although Live Writer did find and load the plugin automatically while it was running (I unzipped the plugin to the plugins folder while Live Writer was still running), lets try restarting Live Writer and try again - Insert clipboard as code:
/// <summary>
/// Converts a local DateTime instance to the MiniTix date time format.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// ISO 8601 date format in Zulu time.
/// </remarks>
/// <param name="date">The date.</param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static string ToMiniTixDateTimeFormat(DateTime date)
{
return date.ToUniversalTime().ToString("u");
}
Much better! Even the XML comments got picked up. Finally, lets see if I can post!