Not much to say yet, but the software did seem to successfully detect all of my Blogger account settings despite the fact that I publish to my own server, not blogspot. (One kudo point so far.)
Also, the interface seems nice and easy to use. There is an edit code view and a live preview of what this post will look like on my blog once it’s published. (12 kudo points for that feature!)
Images can be inserted by browsing local/network drives and through a URL. It doesn’t seem to be able to pull images from flickr directly, but I can just do the usual copy/paste of the flickr code so that’s not too troubling.
There’s more features. I’ll post more if/when I find things worth mentioning. My initial opinion: a pretty sweet app.
I’m about to download and play with the latest beta of Microsoft’s blog authoring software Windows Live Writer and I’ve noticed one of its “features”: the ability to “Publish XHTML-Style markup” [emphasis added]. I’m sorry, but the code is either XHTML or it isn’t. There’s no such thing as XHTML-style or XHTML-like as far as I’m concerned. I’m still going to play with it but sometimes Microsoft, you make me wonder.
Think YouTube for for PowerPoint shows. SlideShare allows you to upload your PPT file (up to 20MB), tag, share, and play. There’s no way to make slideshows private but the concept is interesting, especially for those who want to share their slides and don’t have server space to post them on. The system is currently in private beta (which also limits viewing slides to those with accounts) but I’ve got invites. Drop me an e-mail if you want access.
Microsoft has released beta 1 of the Microsoft Expression Web Designer, the follow-up to FrontPage. I’ve installed and played with it a little bit and here’s my initial reactions:
The interface is nice and easily understood after about five minutes of poking around. I especially like the ability to split the screen between code and WYSIWYG editing.
With Microsoft’s “we write good clean code now” push, a validator is included in Expression. The validator does allow you to choose which level of “compatibility” you would like to test against.
The list of validation errors appears below. In this example, since I was validating against XHTML 1.0 Transitional, it did tell me that the legacy FrontPage Webbot in my code may cause problems. Bravo!
The menu-based CSS editing will take me a bit of getting used to since I’m comfortable writing CSS by hand. I can see this being very useful to someone new to CSS.
The new “Optimize HTML” feature seems useful but I’ve not played with it yet.
Expression’s “Preview in Browser” feature is flexible. It auto-detects which browsers are on your computer and you can set up different preview types including multiple browsers in a specific resolution.
Expression still works with servers that have the FrontPage extensions installed but it doesn’t seem to have a built in FTP and/or SFTP client allowing me to easily access sites on non-FrontPage servers. (I’ve got just one site I work on that is still on a FrontPage server.) I’m not planning on moving from HTML-Kit to Expression until I see what the actual cost will be (or maybe if I get it for free as part of some Office upgrade). Overall though, it does seem to be leaps and bounds ahead FrontPage and Microsoft deserves kudos for this product.
SpeedTest.net is “a general use broadband connection testing site with many geographically dispersed servers to test against. Here we plan to demonstrate and beta test our latest Ookla Speed Test creations such as latency, jitter, client location and distance to server calculations. Test your connection anytime and even store your results for future reference.” If nothing else, it’s cool to watch for those that miss watching the little blocks move around while defragging their hard drive. (Sorry, it only takes about 30 seconds to complete a test.)
The IEBlog page gives most of the details. The biggest thing I noticed is about the install program. This one will automatically remove previous beta installations. You will not need to go through the add/remove programs-based uninstall this time around. (Assuming you’ve previously installed beta 3.)
