Publish to Blog: A note about the previous post

Yes, I know, some of you hotshot Word users/bloggers have known about this for months.

Yesterday, I tried Word2007’s “blog template” methodology for the first time–where you “register” your blog (as long as it’s one of the major programs, for which Word has APIs), then prepare the post in Word, attach categories from your blog’s category list, and publish it.

It worked–like a champ, and with absolutely clean HTML, maybe a little cleaner than WordPress’ own HTML. More to the point, it doesn’t swallow paragraph breaks, and you can work in the comfort of Word (if you find Word comfortable). (The blog template includes a “type title here” area and a set of styles appropriate for blog posts.)

As it stands, that’s nice. The editing space is much more wide open, Word offers occasionally-useful grammar tips, Word has the whole set of search-and-replace stuff, etc., etc.

But there’s another option: Publish as Blog. So I tried that this time. I added Disc 12 to the Word document for the second half of the 50 Movie Pack Western Classics, a document that will become part of the next Cites & Insights, then highlighted Disc 12, copied it to a new Word document, switched to my “web template” for that (the template I use for the HTML versions of C&I essays–all of C&I’s styles, but using typefaces that everybody should have), and clicked on Publish to Blog.

Shazam. It brings up the text with the blog template (overlaid with your existing styles), prompts for a post title, offers to insert categories–and it’s done.

You can see the result. Bring up the post as a separate page and View Source. You’ll see that there’s more HTML cruft than in the first test post, which as far as I can see has absolutely no excess HTML–but it’s not bad at all. The cruft comes from my Web template, to be sure, and you can see that from the spacing (I recently added one pica indents on both sides to all of the Web styles, so the on-screen rendition would have a little white space). Although I did click on Edit on the post, I made absolutely no changes to the HTML whatsoever. What you see is what Word sent directly through the WordPress API.

OK, I’m impressed. Will I switch to Word for all my W.a.R. writing? Probably not; somehow, there’s a different “feel” to creating a typical post directly in the blog. But when I have a complicated piece, or when I’m repurposing part or all of another document…you betcha.

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