Google has just gone above and beyond in the quest for ways to make blogging easier for non-techies. Forget dealing with weird web forms, or figuring out how to create links, or learning “textile” or “markdown” ... now you can publish to Blogger from Microsoft Word, it exports the HTML, cleans it up, and puts it on your ‘blog.
According to their description, “Blogger for Word is a free add-in for Microsoft Word that lets you save a Word document as a post to your Blogger ‘blog with just a few clicks, and without even opening up a browser.”
Of course, not only is it fully capable of making the round trip from Word to Blogger to Word, you can easily retrieve and edit your last 15 posts, and repost them (or save them locally) ... you could use the “draft” mode to let co-‘bloggers review the document, or even just to move a simple Word document to another computer (ok, that would be silly). More importantly, for some, you can write your ‘blog posts off line and publish them later, and presumably you’ll never loose a post at the last second to web glitches — since you’ll have your local copy still in Word.
No more excuses for typos and misspellings guys
Eeeh? Where’s the OpenOffice support? :|
Yeah, I didn’t mention this, but it’s not just Word-only, it’s Word for Windows only. It doesn’t work in Word on the Mac. I suspect this tool is just the result of one of Google’s internal bloggers frustrations, and isn’t really as polished as it would be if they’d actually made a decision to create such a tool.
It also doesn’t work with tablet ink, and doesn’t handle complex situations like tables at all. Still, way ahead of using a simple text box, or even TinyMCE for posting.
I’m sure you could hack something together to post to any blog using a similar trick, and knowing the number of hackers that use WordPress, I’d be suprised if it takes a week
Microsoft Word and Clean Code? Those are truly mutually exclusive concepts!