How to update your blog without ever actually visiting your blog: MS Word
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
There are so many different apps, addons, plugins, and free tools for posting to your blog or your twitter account that there is practically no reason to ever actually stop what you’re doing to update your blog. Writing a research paper? Update your blog from MS Word while you’re at it. Checking your email? Most blog services now offer blog posting via email. Browsing the web? Waiting for Farmville to load? (God, I hope not.) Check out ScribeFire, a web browser plugin that lets you post to your blog from any website. Plus, there are numerous addons that let you update your twitter from your address bar. I use TwitterBar.
Basically the only way you can’t update your blog or twitter is by actually putting pencil to paper and physically writing. There are 50 million different tools for sharing every facet of your life with the entire world. Privacy? That’s so 2001.
Can you remember the outrage over phone tapping, just a few years ago? Lately it seems like phone tapping is a waste of effort. Why tap someone’s phone when you can just subscribe to their podcast, youtube channel, blog, twitter, facebook, or myspace page to find out everything about them?
Anyway, enough ranting. (Because to be honest… I love this insane social web of information.) Let me do an overview of a few ways to make keeping your blog updated more like a goal instead of a pipe dream.
Today I hit the new document button in MS Word and it gave me two options: blank document or new blog post.
WTF? I said. But it’s true – Word has jumped on the blogospherical bandwagon, and you can now publish posts to your blog while pretending to write that essay you’ve been putting off for weeks.
It’s pretty straightforward – start a new blog post, set up your account in two easy steps, and go. One thing to remember though: make sure you have your blog set so that remote publishing is enabled. I didn’t, and there were some definite moments of hair-tearing frustration until I figured it out. They just tell you that it isn’t working. They don’t tell you why.
This is how the post looks from the Word document. Yay, screenshots.
The greatest thing about this is that it’s as easy to edit the formatting of your post as is it to format any Word document. You can categorize your blog with the “Insert Category” button; a drop-down menu appears and you select which one you want, or add a new one.
I haven’t found a way to tag the post yet, so if you want to do that, you will have to go back to your actual blog site and edit the post from there. So much work. But the ease of formatting and the fact that you can copy-paste images earns my respect for this method of blog posting.
Incidentally, this is what a blog post looks like when posted from MS Word.
Next up: ScribeFire.
