Ok… So here is a blog about blogging. I started this blog in March and I quickly learned that the thing I hated most about blogging was that my blogs will consist of articles that need both images and code snippets in them.
So right off the bat, I will have problems blogging with my IPad because I don’t have Visual Studio or my screen capture tool. So I can use the IPad to start a blog or edit an existing blog, but I cannot use it to write a full blog.
The next thing I did not like about blogging was where to put the images. When I write technical documentation for users or customers, I typically write in Word and possibly convert to PDF. With those tools, I simply take a screen capture with Greenshot or SnagIt, mark up the image, copy to the clipboard and paste it into my document – quick and easy. No saving to the disk, no uploading and inserting a link. With blogging, my blog never “flowed” because I was always stopping to “deal” with images. Additionally, copying and pasting code from Visual Studio never really displayed the way I wanted.
So I decided to write my next blog with Word so that it flowed. My plan was to then see what the best way would be to copy and paste the word document into a blog post. When I finish the post, I went to research posting Word to a blog and I found that starting with Word 2007 (my edition), it actually had a built in Blog posting tool! How cool! Problem was, I had trouble making it connect to my http://jdready.blogspot.com account. So I created a WordPress.com account and I was able to make it connect there. But still, there were formatting problems.
I continued my search for blog posting software when a product called “Windows Live Writer” continued to come up. I already use Windows Live Messenger for IM and it turned out I already had Writer installed. I was instantly able to connect to my original Blogger account – and, it magically uploaded and connected my images to my Blog!
Everything was going along swimingly! I created several blogs and was really enjoying the experience… Until… This morning, I tried to post a particularly long post, and when WLW connected to Blogger, I got an error (403 – Forbidden). What is forbidden? Why is it forbidden? None of these questions were immediately answered, so I started Googling…
What I found was that it seemed to have something to do with images. Up to this point, I was not paying any attention to how or why or where WLW was posting images – it was just magic that worked… But not it was not working. So I needed to learn more about this “magic”. The posts indicated that WLW was saving images to another Google service called “Picasa”. If you Google “Picasa”, you go to a Google photo sharing site and are prompted to download a program called Picasa. This didn’t seem right, so I them Googled “picasa web album” and found what I was looking for!
Because I was already logged into Google, I was suddenly presented with 2 albums: JD Ready: Pocket Protector (0 photos) and Windows Live Writer (62 photos).
At first, I thought my 403 Errors were because I was trying to upload too many images (which is why I have a 5 part blog series instead of a 3 part series!). But the truth is, when WLW starts communicating with Google (both Blogger and Picasa are Google products), it gets a security “token” if that token expires during a session (like me taking over an hour to write my 3rd blog post), Picasa’s service will return a 403.
All I had to do to clear the 403 was to shut down WLW and start it up again. I presume it got a new security token and I was able to continue my blog posting!
It sounds like you have an effective method for including screen shots in your blogs...I’ll keep that in mind if I ever blog.
ReplyDeleteThis is a bit of a tangent, but kind of a related note…at my current job, we were looking for ways to quickly document, share and collaborate on development standards, best practices, tips and tricks, etc…we didn't have a good Wiki system in place, and even on the better Wikis I have used, including images is a little troublesome.
One of the devs mentioned OneNote…I had used it for personal documents before, but quickly found OneNote does allow for shared documents as well. And it’s much more like Word when you include images. And the biggest bonus is the text searches also look at discernible text in the screenshots! This was HUGE! This is actually much easier for a developer to quickly add some notes or update a section…no markup, no including image files.
Just yesterday, we upgraded to OneNote 2010, which has a lot more collaboration tools... you can now see a list of recent changes, who changes what, etc…
The files are on a network drive, so they are currently not accessible via the web, and we have no source control around it, but it is 100% better than relying on “tribal knowledge” around here!