Hi, all.

First off, I apologize for not spending much time in this space over the past couple of months.

If you’ve followed my blog activities (and inactivity!), you know that on October 22, I accepted a position as marketing and media director at one of the Assemblies of God’s 100 largest churches. I was thrilled not only to have a job but to be in a position that required top-notch creativity and performance from many areas of my skill site — and many areas I was eager to acquire new skills in.

As marketing and media director I designed several promotional and in-house printed pieces, I wrote press releases, I worked with vendors, I approved and gave guidance for the video and broadcast editing (though not much of that because my staff was not only skilled but very professional and surpassed my knowledge in many ways). My team struggled with print deadlines, malfunctioning and aging equipment, and volatile tempers. I raised the visibility of my overworked team’s plight (loads of stress and too much work), and asked a lot of questions. I didn’t always like the answers, but my job wasn’t to change the church, but to understand it first.

Unfortunately, I failed to understand many things quickly enough and I now find myself looking for work once again after the single shortest tenure at any job I’ve ever held in my short, if rotund, life.

But, fortunately, my hasty departure from the church is not due to any sort of illegal, unethical, or moral wrongdoing. Instead, I chalk it up to a severe failure to communicate on my part. Which is ironic, really, since communication was my … err … job. (Big failure on my part.) As the pastor noted when he released me, my personality was not a good fit for the church.

Upon tearful reflection, we are agreed.

So, once more into the breach. My family and I will covet your prayers yet once more. We are packing up to move to Michigan where we will live with family while we wait for our Chicago home to sell and try to find gainful employment again.

Regards,

View and browse tags for this post…

According to the SiteGround support center, everything’s hunkey dory. According to the server notification center, there are no updates or information that I should know about. So, when I go through the laborious process of collecting information, pulling together stats on server performance (see the graph behind the thumbnail), pinging, tracerouting, and more, I finally get a note back from the help desk:

There has been a short-term overload on the server that hosts your website, caused by an abnormally high activity from a website located on your host server. This probably affected temporarily your website loading speed. SiteGround system administrators are already working on bringing the server performance back to normal.

We would like to assure you that all measures are taken for the problem to be fixed as soon as possible.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation!

Nothing wrong with that response, really. But as I indicated in my trouble ticket, the problems began at 7:30 AM CST, and I was contacting them five hours later! As of this writing, I’m still experiencing server difficulties with long lags and numerous “500 Application” type errors.

I understand what it’s like to provide support to a large user-community — I used to provide help desk and technical support to a network of 1,000 computer users. Yes, it’s not the same scale as, say, 1,000 web sites on a single server on a server farm of hundreds of computers … but I at least get what’s going on.

But there’s gotta be a better way to provide feedback. Despite my complaints SiteGround has yet to initiate a proactive email blast system or even an RSS feed for updates. I mean, how hard could this be? Set up a single RSS feed for each server, and an aggregate feed for all servers, and whenever there’s an outage, plug a note into the feed about the outage and what’s going on. Then, as it’s resolved, plug another note in. Communicate!

:: sigh ::

I suppose if I had a job this wouldn’t irritate me as much. But, nevertheless, it ain’t fun. SiteGround’s answer, of course, to my problems is to buy virtual private network hosting on a dedicated server. Yeah. If I were making $100 a week from Google ads, that might make sense. But, alas, no.

So, anyhow, sorry you’re experiencing problems. I’m sure it’ll be fixed within the next several hours.

If you’re part of the one-percenters who comment here from time-to-time you might be happy to know that I have enabled a feature to edit comments after you’ve posted them, and you don’t even have to leave the page! (Thanks to Ronald Huereca.)

Come on, leave a comment and give it a whirl! You know you want to.

I’ve set the tool to allow you to edit your comments for 90 minutes after you’ve submitted it. I have no idea what the system will do if you’ve never commented before and your missive winds up in the moderation pool. But it would be useful to find out. (Hint.)

FireFox Search Plug-in

PneumaBlogs
Toolset

• List of Bloggers
  (Also available via Squidoo)
  
  
• Most Recent Posts
  
  
• Power Viewer
  (All posts, searchable too!)
  
  
• Search PneumaBloggers’ Sites
  
  
• PneumaSearch plus FireFox Searchbar
  
  
• OPML file
  
  
• Complete RSS Feed
  
  
• Widgets for your site!
  PneumaSphere
  All PneumaBlogs

Get your

button here!

First off, fellow PneumaBlogger Christoph Fischer (”my cup of coffee“) saw that I’d created a Google Co-Op tool to search within the entire set of PneumaBloggers (PneumaSearch) and he went off and quickly fabricated a PneumaSearch MyCroft extension for the FireFox search bar. What this means is that if you use FireFox and if you use the built-in FireFox search bar, you can quickly add a tool to your search box that will allow you to search only within the PneumaBlogs universe of bloggers.

Thanks Chris!

Squidoo alternate for PneumaBloggers

In hopes of driving yet more traffic to your sites, I’ve set up a Squidoo Lens for PneumaBloggers. It’s simple, straightforward, and never needs updating since it’s plugged into my auto-generated list of bloggers, and will get updated every time I update this site here. If, for some reason, you’d rather point folks to Squidoo for the list rather than here, feel free.

OPML File

If you want to add all the current PneumaBloggers into your favorite feed-reader so you can track them all yourself, I now offer a fresh OPML file every time I update the site. Feel free to download the pneumablogs.opml here, then import it into your offline feed reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, Google Reader, or whatever. Just note, however, that you won’t necessarily know who the latest additions to the list are say, six months from now. (I have added a “Modified” date to the description field if you want to look to see who’s new or who’s changed.)

However, you could also subscribe to my RSS feed for the PneumaBloggers list so you’ll know when a new one has been added…

Update: You can also display the bloggers and their feeds by using the new SpringWidget OPML viewer, see below.

PneumaBlogs RSS Feed

This is not a feed of all the latest PneumaBlogs post (for that, see below), rather, it’s an RSS feed of just PneumaBloggers. That’s it. It’s every blogger from my PneumaBlogs page in a single RSS feed that you can load up in your feed reader. Then (if everything works properly), whenever a new blogger gets added to the feed, your feed reader will download the freshest item, and Et Voilà! You’ll know there’s someone new to subscribe to.

This is also a handy way to show my constantly updated list of bloggers in your blog, if you know how to display the results of RSS feeds in your template. Sorry, though, that’s too much to go into right now (maybe a future post). Check your blogging software’s features, though, there’s generally a pretty easy way to display RSS feeds in your sidebar.

Update: You can also display the bloggers and their feeds by using the new SpringWidget OPML viewer, see below.

PneumaSphere Re-Feed

Some of you might want to pick and choose who you subscribe to, and that’s fine. That’s why I display all the RSS feed URLs of every blogger on the PneumaBlogs page. However, some of you might want to the whole enchilada to show up in your favorite feed reader, so to do that, I’m providing a special feed here, just for you. It’s based of of my constantly updated list of bloggers, so it’ll always have the latest stuff there (I drop cat-bloggers, many boss-bloggers, and eventually, those who fail to update their website within the last several months). Just point your feed reader here and start drinking from the fire-hose!

PneumaSphere Power Viewer

And if you aren’t satisfied with checking out the last 50-60 posts featured on my PneumaSphere river-of-news page, but you aren’t totally committed to subscribing to the massive re-feed, and you don’t want to go through the trouble of picking and choosing which blogger to follow along with in your reader, then try this beautiful solution: Bookmark my PneumaSphere Power Viewer.

This is a great way to dip into the river-of-news without missing a beat. You can also search the most recent posts, you can view a “tag cloud” of the most popular subject items, and you can browse by date or by author. This is a nice addition to the PneumaBlogs arsenal, and like everything else, it’s kept constantly up-to-date.

The PneumaSphere Widget —On Your Site Now!

If you’d like to host a little river-of-news applet on your website, or even on your desktop, check out the PneumaSphere widget provided by SpringWidgets, below. You can customize it to your liking, here, and stick it just about anywhere that accepts HTML code. Or, as I mentioned, you can just download the widget and run it off your desktop. Very cool.

Or you can grab the code I use to display the above widget:

<object 
      classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" 
      codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" 
      width="400" 
      height="500" 
      align="middle">
      <param 
            name="movie" 
            value="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=RSS Reader.sbw" />
      <param 
            name="flashvars" 
            value="param=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FPneumaBlogs&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;memberId=thespringbox" />
      <param 
            name="quality" 
            value="high" />
      <param 
            name="wmode" 
            value="transparent" />
      <embed 
            allowScriptAccess="always" 
            src="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=RSS Reader.sbw" 
            flashvars="param=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FPneumaBlogs&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;memberId=thespringbox" 
            quality="high" 
            wmode="transparent" 
            width="400" 
            height="500" 
            align="middle" 
            type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
            pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
<div style="font:10px/11px Tahoma, arial;width:400px; text-align:center;">
<a href="http://www.springwidgets.com/widgetize/23/?param=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FPneumaBlogs&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;width=400&height=500" target="_blank">Get this widget!</a>
</div>

Put All the PneumaBloggers and their Feeds on your site!

I was alerted to the possibility of pointing a SpringWidget at my OPML file by Don Synstelein from SpringWidget after posting this entry. So, I tried it out, and it works nicely. See for yourself:

And now you, too, can put this widget anywhere in your blog you’d like or you can download the widget and stick it on your desktop. No more futzing around with Feed Readers or keeping up with my jones! Just grab the code:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" 
      codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" 
      width="400" 
      height="500" 
      align="middle">
      <param name="movie" 
            value="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=RSS Reader.sbw" />
      <param name="flashvars" 
            value="param=http%3A%2F%2Ftatumweb.com%2Fblog%2Fpneumablogs.opml&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;memberId=thespringbox" />
      <param name="quality" 
            value="high" />
      <param name="wmode" 
            value="transparent" />
      <embed allowScriptAccess="always" 
            src="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=RSS Reader.sbw" 
            flashvars="param=http%3A%2F%2Ftatumweb.com%2Fblog%2Fpneumablogs.opml&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;memberId=thespringbox" 
            quality="high" 
            wmode="transparent" 
            width="400" 
            height="500" 
            align="middle" 
            type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
            pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
<div style="font:11px/12px arial;width:400px; text-align:center;">
<a href="http://www.springwidgets.com/widgetize/23/?param=http%3A%2F%2Ftatumweb.com%2Fblog%2Fpneumablogs.opml&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;width=400&height=500"  target="_blank">Get this widget!</a>
</div>

New PneumaBlogger Button

Finally, if you aren’t happy with the tiny little PneumaBlogger badge which, really, doesn’t have much going for it design-wise, you might be more inclined to proudly display your PneumaBloggyness by displaying the fired up square badge, shown here. Either way, visit the PneumaButton post to grab the images and the HTML code for displaying the badge in your sidebar.

Hopefully, that’ll be it for a while. After several weeks of redesign fall-out and blog-tweaking, the PneumaBlogs stuff was the last to get overhauled because there was a lot I had to re-organize. Hopefully, this will be easier to maintain from here on out.

Regards,

Rich

Just now I’ve added a third page to my collection: PneumaSearch. Yes, that’s right, I’ve gone crazy with the whole “Pneuma” prefix, just like I’ve irrationally appended “Rodent” to everything else. I guess, in the tradition of Web 2.0 mash-ups, I’m the PneumaRodent. But that may be carrying things too far. (Talk to my editor about it.)

Anyhow here’s what’s new:

I’ve finally gotten around to evaluating everybody who’s been asking for consideration, and it shows. My paltry list of 70-80 PneumaBloggers has shot up to 130+. That number could change daily, or weekly.

Also, previously, I’ve used the built-in “BlogRoll” or “Links Manager” function of WordPress to manage my ever-growing list of Spirit-filled bloggers. But, no more. The WordPress link management system is just too unwieldy for this sort of list, and it’s too difficult to output and format things just the way I like it. Sure, if I were a crack coder, no problem. But I’m not.

So, after spending hours and hours attempting to fit every online blogrolling tool I could find into my format and needs, I’ve given up. I’m now going old-school and using an Excel spreadsheet to maintain all my information, from email addresses, blog-owner’s names, URLs, and even my pithy descriptions. Who knows, some day maybe I’ll add rankings and ratings.

The upshot of all this for you is that it’s now easier for me to maintain my list and insure it is always kept up to date. Now I can add a blogger, save my spreadsheet, and with a few simple actions, I can have an updated link list out on the site within minutes.

Please, check it out. And notice that nifty little homepage and feed icons. Feedback welcomed.

First: note the obsessive fascination with suffixes. And, yes. I’ve changed the name of the page to PneumaSphere.

Second: This page, too, wasted several hours of research-time trying to find the ideal online aggregator just so I could display a “river of news” for the most recent items from my link list. After trying a dozen aggregation and re-feeding sites, I’ve come back to my old standby, the BDP RSS Aggregator. It’s a sweet application and does nearly everything I need it to do, except manage my linkroll list (see above). So, for that I use Excel. I could bore you to tears with my travails in finding a usable online aggregator, but, well, nobody cares. If you, for some reason, do care, contact me. I’ll send up a prayer for you.

And, finally, my latest addition is a custom Google search of only the bloggers listed in the PneumaBlogs catalog. This, my friends, is very, very cool. For the first time, you can search within only the best of the Spirit-filled blog-world. This is amazing, and I invite you to give it a try.

My only problem with this is, really, the way it breaks my template (or doesn’t play nicely with my template). This may necessitate spending some time with my template files to make them resizeable and more liquid, but all-in-all, it’s still useful.

And if you want to add the PneumaSearch Google Gadget to your Google start page, click here:

Enjoy!

Thank you for your patience!

Rich.

Christoph Fischer

my cup of coffee Christoph is a pastor in the Pentecostal ‘Volksmission’ movement in Germany. Writer, pastor, theologian, doctoral student. Get a jolt of smart, caffeinated blogging here.[Technorati Rank: 1,038,416, position: #79]

David Copeland

Revival Journal A bit of a ministry boss blog and newsletter with some viral articles about revival and evangelism thrown in for good measure.[Technorati Rank: 392,861, position: #49]

Diane Roberts

Crossroads: Where Faith and Inquiry Meet Blogging from a Pentecostal point of view with a touch of the Reformation, Diane says her blog’s central purpose ‘is to examine and discuss current trends in the evangelical church and especially the Charismatic/Pentecostal wing.’[Technorati Rank: 30,262, position: #11]

J. Stephen Conn

Free to Believe Retired pastor, author of ‘Growing up Penteostal,’ and syndicated newspaper columnist, Stephen blogs with an easy-to-read narrative style.[Technorati Rank: 1,932,777, position: #105]

Jeff Richard

Itch’s Desk COG minister blogging and strumming his guitar. As Jeff says, his blog serves to ‘encourage the Body of Christ through a devotional format, as well as occasionally have a laugh or share what God has been speaking to me and leading me to do.’[Technorati Rank: 3,034,263, position: #116]

Matt Green

The Ministry Report Editor of Ministry Today magazine and ordained Assemblies of God minister. Matt’s on top if it all and tells it like it is. From the blog: ‘contains opinion and editorial content intended to generate critical thought and creative action.’[Technorati Rank: 199,243, position: #35]

Paul Grabill

Beside the Point Sr. Pastor of State College A/G church (PA), blogging pre-evangelistically and intimately. Not just a boss-blog, and not just for pagans.[Technorati Rank: 363,597, position: #47]

Rose-Marie Slosek

The Pen of the Wayfarer Relatively new blogger out of New England with poetry and photography interspersed with viral posts. From the site: ‘Ponderings on the matchless journey of following Christ.’ What’s stunning here is that in August of 2006, Rose-Marie contacted me shortly after she began blogging, seeking advice on how to draw attention to her blog. Less than a year later, she has the number-two slot on my list! Some day we’ll have to get Rose-Marie to explain how she rose so quickly in Technorati. Amazing.[Technorati Rank: 2,470, position: #2]

Hop on over to browse the latest!

Okay, so I’m trying out the Windows Live Writer — because I’m a sucker for new tools and I’m always on the lookout for the better (free) blogging tool. Besides, Amy at GentleWhisper made me do it. …

Installation

The install went okay … the second time. The installer wants to add the Windows Live toolbar to Internet Explorer. I initially opted for it, but after Live Writer failed to read my blog settings, I uninstalled everything and started over — this time without the toolbar.

On the second install I de-opted for the MSIE toolbar, since I rarely use MSIE anyhow. This time, Live Writer started up nicely and read my blog settings without halting. Not sure why the toolbar would’ve made a difference. Not sure if it did or not, but second time was the charm.

Setup

After installing, you point LW to your blog address, and it will ask for your userid and password. It automatically figures out what tool you’re using and the necessary configuration is probably handled via XMLRPC. Pretty nice setup with few steps involved.

One interesting thing LW tries to do is download your default blog template and styles along with the images on the page for layout, etc. It does this, apparently, by creating a new post on the blog, then reading back the styles to see what your installation does with titles, body, and etc. As a result, you’ll find a new post on your blog like: “Temporary Post Used For Style Detection (6ce1b7e8-6792-4897-b938-1f089e053)”. (Incidentally, you can stalk who’s testing Windows Live Writer by searching the blogosphere for the phrase “Temporary Post Used for Style Detection.” <grin>)

Editing

Because LW goes through these gyrations, you get the benefit of several different ways to view your current blog post, just like with Word. You get the obligatory HTML View, like Word’s Draft View, which lets you edit raw HTML. Normal View shows you the barebones WYSIWYG view of your post without any real styling. The Web Layout view attempts to load your site’s default CSS so you can see your post with the proper styles applied. The Web Preview attempts to load your site’s default template as well as the stylesheet and will drop your post in-page so you can see what your fine writing will look like in the context of all your sidebars and image junk.

Unfortunately, LW didn’t read my site’s styles correctly. So, I found the folder where the files are stored, which is in an obscure location like this, on my system:

C:\Documents and Settings\
USER\Application Data\
Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates\
9c18eeb8-9423-49dc-8652-0db13f9ecf97\
7eabaaf2-faee-4bd7-9fa8-052de6c196c7\
core-styles.css

After manually downloading my stylesheets and overwriting the styles currently in the blog-templates folders the Web Layout view and Web Preview views were closer to what my blog looked like — especially the Web Layout view. But the Web Preview view (similar to Word’s Print Preview) still didn’t load the images that are supposed to be inlined in my template. So, really, I don’t expect I’ll be using the Web Layout view much. It just isn’t useful when the layout’s essentially broken.

As with Word’s Print Preview, the Web Layout view is not editable. But the other three views all are.

Inserting images was clumsy. There are some interesting features built in to transform the images you add with increased saturation, sepia-toning, black-and white, and so on. You can rotate the image, add a watermark overlay, add margins, and so on. Unfortunately, there are no GUI options for border=”0″ when hyperlinking an image and hspace and vspace options are missing — though you can add margins to the top, bottom, left, and right via inline styles.

You can add images from the web or from your hard drive and optionally upload them via FTP or XMLRPC, or you can opt to do all that manually and not upload images at all (you’d have to upload the images before you included them in your blog post, though, or only link to stuff elsewhere on the Web).

My image insert test proved a tad buggy, though. Live Writer did not recognize the actual pixel height and width of the image I imported. Instead, it multiplied the dimensions times ten. So, the 49×48 icon I imported originally came it at 490×480. When I corrected the width dimension to 49, it automatically changed the width dimension to 47 — which was an error I had to manually correct to 48.

After publishing the post, I checked to see where LW stored the image. It successfully placed my image in my /blog/pix/ folder, but it also created subfolders, which I don’t like, and assigned a new name to my file, which I really don’t like:

/blog/pix/e0f8443ef8e3_3850/logolivewriter17.gif

The image import interface here reminds me too much of the old FrontPage image handling. It tends to provide too many tools to automatically modify the images and image properties I’m trying to add, which I don’t like. The blogging tool shouldn’t pretend to be an image editor or CMS. This is maybe a nice feature for blogging newbies, but in my experience it introduces too many unintended consequences.

There’s an option to add a map to your blog post via Windows Live Map, such as this one below, showing pushpins for the main CTI offices and the rental space where my office is located:

Once you’ve inserted it, it’s not editable, so you’d have to delete it and reinsert a new map if it’s not to your liking. Also, if you haven’t enabled Live Writer to FTP or upload your images automatically, this simply won’t work for you. Even after I manually edited the link to the image to an http URL off my web server, Live Writer still failed to publish my post because it insisted on being able to re-upload an image that is already on my site.

Beyond those sticky problems, I’m not sure how useful this feature really is, but I’m sure it demonstrates how Live Writer will allow for Web 2.0 functionality to be implemented within the tool. We’ll see, as new features and plugins are released. (You can find some early plugins at JefTek.com.)

Someone elsewhere said “Cut and Paste” was broken, but it worked for me. One thing that’s missing, though, is the ability to paste without formatting. Often, when I copy text from a Web page, the styles get carried over into the WYSIWYG editor. The same is true here. So, if I don’t want the styles imported (color, font size, font style, etc.) I have to use an intermediate tool like Notepad to strip the text of its styling before then pasting into LW. Having a Paste as Text option would be nice.

The only styles LW imported into the style dropdown list are the standard “paragraph” and “Heading n” styles. It’d be nice if various styles from the CSS stylesheet would be imported into the style dropdown box, but that would probably generate untold user support issues. It would also be nice to have a built-in style editor, as well.

The spell checker worked fine, but there’s no option to edit your custom dictionary, so I’m not sure where the words are being stored when you add terms. So if you wind up adding an incorrectly spelled term, good luck finding the dictionary text file to edit (the registry provided no clues). There were no options to “Ignore All” nor was there an option to undo a correction.

Live Writer will save your posts to draft automatically every n minutes, but you have to set that manually — auto draft saving is not enabled by default. Which it should be, considering that this is beta software and could crash and burn taking your post down with it.

Publishing

Post properties are easily accessible and provide options to add trackback links, keywords, set commenting options, and the date/time. Unfortunately, adding keywords via the properties tab does nothing (as also happens with the other blogging tools I’ve used). It’d be nice to have other default WordPress options available here, as well, such as the post slug, but that may not be available via XMLRPC.

You can post your draft to your weblog, or go live directly from Live Writer.

Live Writer will automatically ping your favorite feed aggregators, but there are no default sites pre-installed, and you have to enable this option automatically. This is a global setting, and cannot be changed on a per-blog basis. (For instance, you might want to only ping FeedBurner on the weblog where you use FeedBurner, but you might want to ping Ping-O-Matic and Technorati (etc.) when posting to your non-Feedburner driven site. But no dice here. You’ll need to let your blog software do the pinging if that’s the case, or use a third-party pinger like Pong.) Because it’s a global option, you get to this through the Tools/Preferences/Ping servers setting.

Once you’ve published your post you can access it again through the File/Open post dialog, or by clicking on the “Open” icon. Interestingly the “Recent Posts” option in the resulting window doesn’t pull down my weblog’s most recent posts. It does nothing. Instead, I have to select my weblog’s account name in the list to access that blog’s archive. I’m guessing this is because LW is tuned to work with Live Spaces by default, and third-party blog software gets dropped into their own archive space.

Update: After publishing, the local copy of your post remains persistent — even if you’ve made changes via your blog interface. I typically like to shorten my slugs for posts so that the URLs are shorter than my titles. So, after pushing my article out to my blog, I went into WordPress to provide a shorter slug, and I also decided to change my post’s title. After saving my post, I had some other observations to add regarding where the images are saved, and so on, and I attempted to pull down my post from WordPress again to make the changes. My title did not get reset despite the fact that I re-edited the stored copy on WordPress. Apparently, LiveWriter doesn’t pull down the actual blog post, but it restored a copy from my hard drive for editing. This is bad. Very bad.

Further, there are two paces where I can pick a previously published post for re-editing. One is under “Recent Posts” and one is under my blog name, which presumably pulls the post off my blog. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference between the two options since both of them gave me a post with the incorrect title.

Conclusions

All in all, this is a nice, usable blogging tool for WordPress users, but I’m not sure yet that it’s much better than other tools currently available for free. Overall, the nicest feature is the ability to preview your posts using your site’s default styles. This is a great feature because too often writer’s simply cannot spot their errors and typos until they see their post in its final format. (How many times have I read and re-read a post in my editor only to read it once more on my blog and think, “Good golly, who’s the ham-handed writer that mangled my deathless prose?”

Unfortunately, this feature is marred by Live Writer’s flakiness in downloading and properly using the styles in place on my blog. I doubt most users would be motivated to find their stylesheets and overwrite Live Writer’s first attempt as I had to do.

I’ll keep trying it out. We’ll see if it sticks.

Update: As noted in the “Publishing” section above, Live Writer’s apparent tendency to serve up local copies of my blog entries for re-editing make this a failing contender for blogging. At least for now. That’s why this is still in beta. Hopefully improvements will come if the development team gets wind of reviews like this one.

Installation

The install went okay … the second time. The installer wants to add the Windows Live toolbar to Internet Explorer. I initially opted for it, but after Live Writer failed to read my blog settings, I uninstalled everything and started over–this time without the toolbar.

On the second install I de-opted for the MSIE toolbar, since I rarely use MSIE anyhow. This time, Live Writer started up nicely and read my blog settings without halting. Not sure why the toolbar would’ve made a difference. Not sure if it did or not, but second time was the charm.

Setup

After installing, you point LW to your blog address, and it will apsk for your userid and password. It automatically figures out what tool you’re using and the necessary configuration is probably handled via XMLRPC. Pretty nice setup with few steps involved.

One interesting thing LW tries to do is download your default blog template and styles along with the images on the page for layout, etc. It does this, apparently, by creating a new post on the blog, then reading back the styles to see what your installation does with titles, body, and etc. As a result, you’ll find a new post on your blog like: “Temporary Post Used For Style Detection (6ce1b7e8-6792-4897-b938-1f089e053)”. (Incidentally, you can stalk who’s testing Windows Live Writer by searching the blogosphere for the phrase “Temporary Post Used for Style Detection.” <grin>)

Editing

Because LW goes through these gyrations, you get the benefit of several different ways to view your current blog post, just like with Word. You get the obligatory HTML View, like Word’s Draft View, which lets you edit raw HTML. Normal View shows you the barebones WYSIWYG view of your post without any real styling. The Web Layout view attempts to load your site’s default CSS so you can see your post with the proper styles applied. The Web Preview attempts to load your site’s default template as well as the stylesheet and will drop your post in-page so you can see what your fine writing will look like in the context of all your sidebars and image junk.

Unfortunately, LW didn’t read my site’s styles correctly. So, I found the folder where the files are stored, which is in an obscure location like this, on my system:

C:\Documents and Settings\
USER\Application Data\
Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates\
9c18eeb8-9423-49dc-8652-0db13f9ecf97\
7eabaaf2-faee-4bd7-9fa8-052de6c196c7\
core-styles.css

After manually downloading my stylesheets and overwriting the styles currently in the blogtemplates folders the Web Layout view and Web Preview views were closer to what my blog looked like–especially the Web Layout view. But the Web Preview view (similar to Word’s Print Preview) still didn’t load the images that are supposed to be inlined in my template. So, really, I don’t expect I’ll be using the Web Layout view much. It just isn’t useful when the layout’s essentially broken.

As with Word’s Print Preview, the Web Layout view is not editable. But the other three views all are.

Inserting images was clumsy. There are some interesting features built in to transform the images you add with increased saturation, sepia-toning, black-and white, and so on. You can rotate the image, add a watermark overlay, add margins, and so on. Unfortunately, there are no GUI options for border=”0″ when hyperlinking an image and hspace and vspace options are missing–though you can add margins to the top, bottom, left, and right via inline styles.

You can add images from the web or from your hard drive and optionally upload them via FTP or XMLRPC, or you can opt to do all that manually and not upload images at all (you’d have to upload the images before you included them in your blog post, though, or only link to stuff elsewhere on the Web).

My image insert test proved a tad buggy, though. Live Writer did not recognize the actual pixel height and width of the image I imported. Instead, it multiplied the dimensions times ten. So, the 49×48 icon I imported originally came it at 490×480. When I corrected the width dimension to 49, it automatically changed the width dimension to 47–which was an error I had to manually correct to 48.

After publishing the post, I checked to see where LW stored the image. It successfully placed my image in my /blog/pix/ folder, but it also created subfolders, which I don’t like, and assigned a new name to my file, which I really don’t like:

/blog/pix/e0f8443ef8e3_3850/logolivewriter17.gif

The image import interface here reminds me too much of the old FrontPage image handling. It tends to provide too many tools to automatically modify the images and image properties I’m trying to add, which I don’t like. The blogging tool shouldn’t pretend to be an image editor or CMS. This is maybe a nice feature for blogging newbies, but in my experience it introduces too many unintended consequences.

There’s an option to add a map to your blog post via Windows Live Map, such as this one below, showing pushpins for the main CTI offices and the rental space where my office is located:

Once you’ve inserted it, it’s not editable, so you’d have to delete it and reinsert a new map if it’s not to your liking. Also, if you haven’t enabled Live Writer to FTP or upload your images automatically, this simply won’t work for you. Even after I manually edited the link to the image to an http URL off my web server, Live Writer still failed to publish my post becuase it insisted on being able to re-upload an image that is already on my site.

Beyond those sticky problems, I’m not sure how useful this feature really is, but I’m sure it demonstrates how Live Writer will allow for Web 2.0 functionality to be implemented within the tool. We’ll see, as new features and plugins are released. (You can find some early plugins at JefTek.com.)

Someone elsewhere said “Cut and Paste” was broken, but it worked for me. One thing that’s missing, though, is the ability to paste without formatting. Often, when I copy text from a Web page, the styles get carried over into the WYSIWYG editor. The same is true here. So, if I don’t want the styles imported (color, font size, font style, etc.) I have to use an intermediate tool like Notepad to strip the text of its styling before then pasting into LW. Having a Paste as Text option would be nice.

The only styles LW imported into the style dropdown list are the standard “paragraph” and “Heading n” styles. It’d be nice if various styles from the CSS stylesheet would be imported into the style dropdown box, but that would probably generate untold user support issues. It would also be nice to have a built-in style editor, as well.

The spell checker worked fine, but there’s no option to edit your custom dictionary, so I’m not sure where the words are being stored when you add terms. So if you wind up adding an incorrectly spelled term, good luck finding the dictionary text file to edit (the registry provided no clues). There were no options to “Ignore All” nor was there an option to undo a correction.

Live Writer will save your posts to draft automatically every n minutes, but you have to set that manually–auto draft saving is not enabled by default. Which it should be, considering that this is beta software and could crash and burn taking your post down with it.

Publishing

Post properties are easily accessible and provide options to add trackback links, keywords, set commenting options, and the date/time. Unfortunately, adding keywords via the properties tab does nothing (as also happens with the other blogging tools I’ve used). It’d be nice to have other default WordPress options available here, as well, such as the post slug, but that may not be available via XMLRPC.

You can post your draft to your weblog, or go live directly from Live Writer.

Live Writer will automatically ping your favorite feed aggregators, but there are no default sites pre-installed, and you have to enable this option automatically. This is a global setting, and cannot be changed on a per-blog basis. (For instance, you might want to only ping FeedBurner on the weblog where you use FeedBurner, but you might want to ping Ping-O-Matic and Technorati (etc.) when posting to your non-Feedburner driven site. But no dice here. You’ll need to let your blog software do the pinging if that’s the case, or use a third-party pinger like Pong.) Because it’s a global option, you get to this through the Tools/Preferences/Ping servers setting.

Once you’ve published your post you can access it again through the File/Open post dialog, or by clicking on the “Open” icon. Interestingly the “Recent Posts” option in the resulting window doesn’t pull down my weblog’s most recent posts. It does nothing. Instead, I have to select my weblog’s account name in the list to access that blog’s archive. I’m guessing this is because LW is tuned to work with Live Spaces by default, and third-party blog software gets dropped into their own archive space.

Update: After publishing, the local copy of your post remains persistent–even if you’ve made changes via your blog interface. I typically like to shorten my slugs for posts so that the URLs are shorter than my titles. So, after pushing my article out to my blog, I went into WordPress to provide a shorter slug, and I also decided to change my post’s title. After saving my post, I had some other observations to add regarding where the images are saved, and so on, and I attempted to pull down my post from WordPress again to make the changes. My title did not get reset despite the fact that I re-edited the stored copy on WordPress. Apparently, LiveWriter doesn’t pull down the actual blog post, but it restored a copy from my hard drive for editing. This is bad. Very bad.

Further, there are two paces where I can pick a previously published post for re-editing. One is under “Recent Posts” and one is under my blog name, which presumably pulls the post off my blog. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference between the two options since both of them gave me a post with the incorrect title.

Conclusions

All in all, this is a nice, usable blogging tool for WordPress users, but I’m not sure yet that it’s much better than other tools currently available for free. Overall, the nicest feature is the ability to preview your posts using your site’s default styles. This is a great feature because too often writer’s simply cannot spot their errors and typos until they see their post in it’s final format. (How many times have I read and re-read a post in my editor only to read it once more on my blog and think, “Good golly, who’s the ham-handed writer that mangled my deathless prose?”

Unfortunately, this feature is marred by Live Writer’s flakiness in downloading and properly using the styles in place on my blog. I doubt most users would be motivated to find their stylesheets and overwrite Live Writer’s first attempt as I had to do.

I’ll keep trying it out. We’ll see if it sticks.

Update: As noted in the “Publishing” section above, Live Writer’s apparent tendency to serve up local copies of my blog entries for re-editing make this a failing contender for blogging. At least for now. That’s why this is still in beta. Hopefully improvements will come if the development team gets wind of reviews like this one.

After carefully pawing through several dozen WordPress themes I settled on several I liked and tried them all out. If you were browsing the blog last Thursday night, you probably noticed the design dance the site was going through. Or maybe you thought you needed medication?

I settled on the WuCoco theme designed by Mike Lococo for a few reasons: 1) it was three-column, and I wasn’t ready to leave that design structure. 2) It was WordPress 2.0-ready, so I didn’t have to worry about the theme breaking in three weeks. 3) It was widget-enabled, which would allow me to fiddle with the contents of my sidebars without having to muck around in the template. And, more importantly, 4) It was very CSS-driven, no tables, and visually pleasing. Unfortunately, it’s a big design. Anybody surfing with less than 800×600 resolution will be profoundly irritated right now.

Sorry. I’m a big man. I need a big blog.

I carried over the mast head from my old design, and I superimposed it on one of my macro photos, heavily Photoshopped, of course, giving me a nice industrial-grunge feel. (As though my weblog were somewhat postmodern, edgy, and cynically urban. Right. That’ll only fool the newbies for about thirty seconds.) I had to modify things a bit to give the theme a blue color scheme, and I added a footer for my button-junk. Aside from that, Mike Lococo has provided us a great new design. Thanks, Mike.

So, sorry for all the flux and chaos, but I think the dust is pretty much settled now. I hope you like the new design. I certainly do.

Rich.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog and don’t use a feed reader to monitor the site, you can still catch all the blogalicious stuff right in your inbox by just subscribing to BlogRodent by email.

And, here’s something I have failed to mention before about this: You can get the notification in HTML format–but only if you register first (not my decision–it’s a function of the plugin I’m using).