Trying Windows Live Writer beta 2

Seems to be pretty nice. I told it the url of my blog, and it analyzed it, told me I was using blogger, and installed the appropriate components. It will also allow me to edit in more of a WYSIWYG than the default web-based blogger tool will. It will let me edit in a way so that I will see what the final post will actually look like. No doubt this is because it just downloaded my style sheet from blogger, and is now using some edit-enabled version of some Internet Explorer control to let me do my editing.

While the blogger tool is great, I sometimes suffer from a poor internet connection, and then semi-offline blogging is a good idea.

I don't know if I'll actually use this in the end. It depends on what features it has, how well it works, stability and so forth, but I'll try to do a couple of posts with it to see how it works.

It is quite obviously made for vista, and it looks less than stellar on my XP system, but I don't see myself switching anytime soon. I tried a Vista beta this summer, and I was not impressed. It wasn't stability or anything like that, windows killed that beast years ago. Rather it was the completely unusable "interface" that they have equipped vista with. I love the way Explorer (Windows explorer, not Internet Explorer) works. They threw that out completely and instead gave me some useless search-like tool. If I wanted to search, I'd install google desktop. I organize my files and folders. I know exactly where to find things. I don't use the indexing stuff in xp either.

It's going to be interesting to see how it handles spelling and tags (called categories) here too. I really like the way it is done in the blogger web tool. (Hmm, not nearly as good as blogger, but it's just one thing. We will see).

I can't insert pictures, because it has some weird "upload to ftp"-functionality, which blogger doesn't use. Good thing I don't publish pictures that often then.

How about adding links? (This is a really nice photo blog, you should check it out). That's something I do from time to time.(That seemed to work fine.) Shortcuts for text formatting seem to work fine too.

I also do quotes, from time to time, and I must say that I find the blogger tool lacking in this respect. Things like empty lines before and after quotes show up weird. Also, the (blogger) preview leaves a lot to be desired, since it doesn't take in to account your font size or column width when showing you your preview. Blogger should just load up your style sheet and present the preview via that. That would be much better.

Nicely done of them to put the buttons in the same order as in the blogger interface. Someone up in Redmond is thinking. (Yes, much better quote handling than blogger). That is it for now I guess. More things will follow...

(The last thing I do before posting is spell check. WLW does NOT have this functionality! What a waste. They've been doing it in word since forever. It should be included.)

Going to blogger let me do some spell checks, and I had been somewhat naughty.

Pi

My last post was apparently number 314.

I'm a bit annoyed right now, because my internet has gone back to sucking ass. During exam weeks it was fine, but now, for some reason, everything takes ages to load, and I have slower response times than on a GSM modem.

Another thing that pisses me off was that google decided to introduce the possibility of having blogger in a variety of different languages, so I was greeted with a dutch page when I went to log in.
Not only that, but when someone else from my ip range visits my blogger profile, it's in dutch, even though their google settings indicate English. I hate localization of software. I know a lot of other people like it, but I feel like more of a victim than a beneficiary.
Also, why the hell does google's spell checker think internet should be spelled with a capital I? It's not a fucking name, it's a concept.

Looking on the bright side of life, however, we've had a nice temperature of 28 degrees here all weekend. I've been walking around in shorts for 3 days, and I'm absolutely loving it.
I had a solero ice cream today. When they were introduced, there was only one flavor, Mango with vanilla ice cream. About 1-2 years after the introduction, they removed this flavor and started adding all sorts of other outlandish flavors. This went on for years, without the best mango flavor ever returning. Until now. When I went to the store today, I found a "solero exotic", which turned out to be exactly the old mango taste that I enjoyed so much.
I also saw that the liberal party in Norway is moving towards passing a law that would make both file sharing legal for private use, and ban DRM. Both very cool things. Definitely steps in the right direction. I foresee DRM being all but extinct within 5-10 years.
I have heard about similar bills in Sweden and the EU, but I can't remember where.

300 Posts!

I guess posting about reaching 300 posts in your 301st post is a bit corny, but hey, I didn't see this one coming.
Seeing as how blogger uses the same size template as me, I'm pretty sure this wonderful image will fit right in.
It seems to be scaled down. I hope blogger will not fuck this one up. Ohh well, as long as the 300 is visible, I'm happy.