Netbasic Ltd.

My turn to blog again this week, so first of all I thought I’d tell you about one of the best features of Word 2007 – you can blog directly from it, making it even easier to upload content to the web.

In some regards it’s not as advanced as ecto (or the free w.Bloggar) for interfacing with and editing raw blog content but in others it really is.

For example I have a lot of old word based science essays that I thought I’d like to publish on my personal blog and as such these contain a large quantity of things like this:

When word saves a page as html for example it can convert all these math-type/equation editor plug-in objects to images which is fine if you JUST want the page as a web page.

Invariably though, if anything is saved as a webpage from word it is bloated with excess styles (hence the need for Dreamweaver’s clean up word html command) and you’ll generally want to edit it in some way to make it look more presentable, as the presentation offered by word is usually somewhat lacking.

So when you save an essay with a lot of equation objects in it, that leads to tonnes of files which are a pain to copy back into a blog manually or edit along with the page content in Dreamweaver – literally hours can be spent reformatting the document.

Word 07’s publish to blog function though cuts out all of this rubbish and generally does an excellent job in maintaining formatting (possibly because it may be restricted to sending data for the post in some predetermined minimal format or it doesn’t have to ‘worry’ about styles or html page structure so much) and also uploading the images with the correct paths/associations – which is AMAZING!

Secondly today, I’d like to introduce you to the easy button (Staples, £2.50) a fantastic little device for helping you get the point across, worryingly though it seems to have the same voice as Luke! I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of this little fellah in the office and on the blog!