Friday, September 01, 2006

Writely to Blogger -- what's the frequency?

As I said a couple of posts down, Writely is a cool tool for posting to Blogger, but is there a compelling reason to use it instead of the Blogger Dashboard?

Well, the big fly in the Writely-to-Blogger ointment is that none of my Writely-created blog posts come over with the title, even though they are titled in Writely.

The thing is in beta, so I can't expect the world, and as I said in the post directly below, Writely does what it does pretty well -- but is it worth doing?

As a replacement for the little-known Pote, which has proven very useful to me when I wanted to write a review and save it to the Web for later downloading and e-mailing, Writely is a proverbial quantum leap forward. The fact that it's so darn fast is a serious plus. Also in its favor are the ability to save in some key formats: Word, Open Office, HTML and RTF (add Save As Text, please!).

As I've said, true Word format with margins and smart quotes are what I really need. Have you ever sent a text file without the smart quotes and relied on your editor to get them right? I have. It's never worked out. And that's why writers NEED to submit copy in Word format with the smart quotes all set up -- it saves work for the editor and makes the writer and editor happy. And we all want to be happy.

3 comments:

Digitalnomad said...

I have tested this myself and have the same problems.

I was curious if you know, or think, if there is any backlink benefit from Google for making posts from Writely?

BTW, how did you set up the email verification tool?

Thanks

Steven Rosenberg said...

E-mail verification? If you mean for comments, when you're in the Dashboard of Blogger, you go to Settings, then Comments, then you can set it up the way you want. You can have all comments held for approval, or just use word verification -- I think that's the best tool (so people have to type in something, you won't get automatic spam) ... and you can give each blog an e-mail address that will alert you when there are comments ... that's at the bottom.

As far as Writely -- now Google Docs -- goes, I think apps delivered over the Web is already here. I do a lot of work like that already -- that's what Blogger, Movable Type and the other big blog systems are all about. Same for e-mail via Web sites. It's only natural to extend that functionality to word processing, spreadsheets, photo editing (Picasa) and backups (Can't remember the name of what AOL offers -- is it X-Drive?). And now video pretty much comes through the browser with Flash. Paying a company like Google, or even Microsoft, to maintain apps and data over IP is the wave of the present -- and the future.

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