Calling All Bloggers
I love to blog. In fact, I have three different blogs (including this one) that I use for various purposes. But to be honest, the infrastructure software that supports the technology is still extremely young, and it shows. In a moment, more about what I consider to be various blogging shortcomings, but first…
If you’re a blogger, whether or not you like your existing software, we here at Macromedia want to know about it. What’s your incentive? Take this short and simple survey about your blog authoring style and get a shot at a shiny new iPod Mini (4 Gb, Silver). The next question you’re likely to ask yourself is “Why does Macromedia want to know about my blog authoring style?” Stay tuned…
My style is to use Word. That’s right; every word you see on this blog is initially typed into Word. Why Word? Well, I use Word mostly because of its inline spelling and grammar checking. No page refresh to walk through my post content spelling errors, and I’ve never seen a web-based interface offer grammar assistance. Given that Word is for word processing and not for blog content authoring, that’s where it breaks down for me.
If I were to dream up a fancy blog authoring tool, the first feature it would have is inline spelling and grammar checking. Beyond that, my wish list looks something like this (in no particular order)…
Code Snippets
Clearly Word doesn’t handle code well, and if I cut/paste it into the text field that the various blog systems provide for me, I often have to go back and use special characters (i.e. space and less-than/greater-then) to get it to format correctly. What’s that you say? Edit the styles to handle this for me? That brings me to…
WYSIWYG Styles and Templates
Sure I could get into the template code and modify the styles, but I just want to post content. The more time I have to spend getting into the guts of a publishing system means the less time I have to devote to the quality/quantity of my content. And don’t even get my started on the templates!
Every system uses its own template system. Much of the details of these systems is buried in tech manuals and requires a substantial amount of digging and studying. Again, I just want to post content. It’s really bad if I want to change elements in the template that aren’t a part of my posted content. For example, if I want to add another section to my sidebar, then I’m likely to spend a substantial time investment in trying to dig through all the documentation.
Attachments
Most blog systems allow for images and archive files (i.e. Zip), but that’s where the features end. What I want to do is to post Flash files, Flash video, Captivate demos, Flex applications, etc. All of these require more intelligence than modern blog systems seem to possess. Every post I make with these assets requires that I get into the guts of the code and start writing object tags.
Advanced XML/RSS
I love Flickr! Flickr allows me to upload images from my phone by sending them to an approved email address. Flickr then allows me to expose my uploaded photos through any number of means – one of which includes RSS itself.
What I would love would be to tell my blog system that I want it to display the RSS feed from my Flickr photo stream. Then it would visually allow me to select the elements out of that RSS to display. And of course something like a photo stream would be in the sidebar, which would require me to get back into the template, which takes me right back to a previous point.
Since RSS is just XML, it’d be even better if perhaps the authoring tool could allow visual manipulation of any XML data. If the tool was XSL aware, and could generate this for me, then it’d be a snap to grab data, format it, and post it on my blog in the sidebar - all without me having to know anything beyond word processing skills. What a wonderful world that would be.