Windows Live Writer Beta & BlogCFC Part I

If you follow this blog then you will know that I am a big fan of BlogCFC, if you are new to this blog well now you know. Once again just a quick kudos to the creator Ray Camden, great job Ray! One complaint that I hear from people is they just do not like using the text area to publish articles. Some people (including me) have no problem coding in text areas. This is mainly because I write most of my articles in Google Docs before I publish them anyways. I understand why some people just do not like the boring old text area and fortunately for those people BlogCFC has an answer. The two answers you have are using a rich text editor such as fckEditor or TinyMCE or using the built in XML-RPCsupport. This article will not cover the rich text option (but you can email me on the topic if you like) but we will dive deeply into the XML-RPC option as well as using the new Windows Live Writer Beta.

Before we go into XML-RPC support in BlogCFC I guess we should cover what XML-RPC is. First lets take a look at the definition by the XML-RPC website

It's a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet. It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.

So basically it is a specification that allows us to make remote calls over the Internet using http & XML. This allows software on the Internet to be driven by desktop or hand held applications. Now that you have a little idea of what it is lets talk about it more specifically in BlogCFC. BlogCFC, from what I can tell added XML-RPC support in version 5.5 so If you are running a previous version you need to upgrade. Wait, if you are running anything other than the latest release (5.8.001 at the time of this article) than you need to upgrade!

Ok, now you are caught up on the technical stuff lets talk about the software and why this came about. I have a customer who enjoys blogging in her personal time but just does not like the traditional text area or rich text area interfaces. I told her no problem I have the answer you are looking for. She is a windows customer so told her to take a look at Windows Live Writer Beta. Windows Live Writer Beta is a desktop application that makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog. Let's take a look at a look at some of the features

• Compatible with your blog service - Writer can publish to Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many other weblog services.
• WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing - Writer knows your blog's visual theme. So you can see exactly what your posts will look like as you write them, before you publish. No more wasting time previewing your posts online.
• Rich media publishing - Writer makes publishing rich media as easy as sending e-mail. Insert and customize photos, maps, tags, and lots of other cool content--then click the "Publish" button. It's that easy.
• Powerful editing features - Creating compelling blog posts is much easier with the ability to insert and edit tables, check spelling as you type, and format and hyperlink content at your fingertips.
• Offline editing - Now you can blog anytime, from anywhere. Writer synchronizes drafts on your blog with changes you make when you're offline, so you don't have to worry about reconciling different versions.

One of my favorite features of the software is that it allows you to change views for the post between code view, web layout & a full preview using your blogs theme. The full preview mode is going to be a hug hit with my customers. I also like the image & table support it brings. Finally as noted above the software allows for offline editing. You can either save the draft as a local copy or basically publish the article to your blog as un released article. I beleive it is a combination of such a great product and software like Windows Live Writer that will allow us to start bringing BlogCFC to the masses

This will end part I of this article. I just wanted to get your feet wet with the idea that you can publish your posts with great software such as Windows Live Writer directly to your BlogCFC installation. In the next article we will take a look how to install the service & setting up your options. If you can not wait and want to install it you may run into some issues. If you do feel free to email me or comment here. Also want to send out a big thanks to Scott Pinkston who helped me get through a couple of installation issues.