If you are like me you have a large volume of content sitting in Microsoft Word documents that you would like to publish on your Blog. You are comfortable and productive using Word and prefer to keep your source documents in Word format on your local laptop of corporate LAN.
It would be very attractive to be able to just open up your Word documents and copy and paste sections into your blog entries. Trouble is the resultant HTML is horrendous: bloated and full of unwanted styling.
I have tried a number of approaches to getting good clean HTML into blogs from my Word documents, but have not yet found a simple, reliable method.
The approach I am currently using looks promising. Nick Lothian put me onto Windows Live Writer. This is a free downloadable tool that acts much like a cut-down Word.
I open my source Word document and copy and paste text into Live Writer. This nifty tool seems to do a good job of removing all the excess HTML including unwanted styling. It also converts headings, lists etc to HTML equivalents. Then I can use Live Writer’s inbuilt blog capabilities to post into my blog.
So far I’ve only tried it with fairly simple sections of my Word documents but it looks promising.
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[…] I scored a measly 2%! Ah but of course I would on my work laptop, I’ve got real work to do. Can’t be sitting around all day digg’ing… Even on my personal computer I only manage a measly 18%, but then I look at the list of sites the score is based on and I’m not seeing many familiar names. While there are a growing number of browser-based web 2.0 applications that I use, I seem to leaning more towards the webified desktop applications that are providing a flexible layer between the user and the online services they use regularily. For example, the Flock browser brings together a number of online services including social bookmarking, online photo storage, news aggregation, blogging and more; services that ‘Web 2.0 aware’ folk are using everyday (and in some case all day). Windows Live Writer has been mentioned by Geoff and is another desktop app I’ll be trying out in the coming weeks. Konfabulator gives me funkier way to keep track of my Jira issues, weather conditions and visits to my personal website. […]
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