OpenOffice Supports Direct Blog Posting
Having just installed OpenOffice on my laptop I was quite surprised to see that extensions are now available for the software. I’m unsure of whether this has always been the case; but it certainly is now.
Of particular interest is the Sun Weblog Publisher 1.1.0. According to the description, the plugin is designed to let OpenOffice users take advantage of the formatting capabilities inherent in the software, and then having done that quickly post the results to their blogs.
Personally speaking this is a really nice option to have. I frequently write blog posts on the train on the way into work in the mornings and then copy and paste the contents into WordPress before publishing it. Unfortunately this often involves reformatting text that previously looked just fine in the original document.
In the case of this plugin you will apparently be able to “use the advanced word processing features of the Writer to create blogs with tables, bullets, hyperlinks, graphics, and spellchecking via the office suite’s spellchecking technology. ”
Documents are created as per normal, then when you’re back online you can quickly publish the post by going to File → Send → To Weblog. You’re then given the option of including a title and category before finalising the post.
The description continues:
“The new Sun Weblog Publisher 1.1 now supports Roller, WordPress, Gerneric ATOM, MovableType (new) and MetaWeblog on servers like WordPress.com (new), Blogger.com, Blogspot.com and Typepad.com (new)”
With this being my very first attempt at this process it remains to be seen what results I’ll have. Let the test begin.
Update: At least this first time through I was only able to publish the post as a draft. I also discovered after having done that, that there was a fair amount of formatting to correct because it didn’t display very well on screen initially. I’ll experiment with the settings and see if I can improve the process any. All in all it’s ok, but didn’t improve the posting time any.
