First things first, let me assure you that this is not me and my typical Microsoft fanboy-ism speaking. Secondly, let me tell you that this post is not a credible source for the “best offline editor for Wordpress”; I have only tried Windows Live Writer, there are hundreds of offline blog editors out there.

Even during the first months of this blog, I was already made aware of the shortcomings of the Wordpress’ default online editor. One of the said shortcomings is that you need to manually “hack” TinyMCE’s settings to achieve the perfect WYSIWYG effect that matches your blog’s font setting. Another shortcoming is that it doesn’t have a default spell check engine that helps grammar offenders like me (although you can download a spell check plug-in from Wordpress but it doesn’t work as nice as Microsoft Word’s spell checker). So I ended up composing my posts in Microsoft Word and painstakingly copy/pasting them to my site; and let me tell you know, it is not a pretty sight (and Wordpress does not recommend it). What kept me from abandoning Word is the ability to have an “offline” backup of my blog posts and that just about it.

When I learned of offline editors for blogs, I quickly downloaded the (then) latest copy of Live Writer and I was disappointed! There were a lot of XML RPC errors and Live Writer did not automatically match my blog’s font to the editor’s font and worst of all, you have to jump a lot of hoops to change the editor’s font especially if it’s a non-standard Microsoft font! So I ditched the idea and went back to Microsoft Word.

Not so long ago, I got tired of composing my posts in Word and manually copy/pasting them to my blog so I contented myself to just use the online Wordpress editor (since I was able to fix TinyMCE’s setting) and just perform manual backups of the database from time to time. It was okay for quite some time until I got a bad RAM stick and have my Firefox randomly crash while composing a blog post which eventually resulted in me trying to remember what I typed in the post for the third time in the last five hours. It was a sobering sight – a programmer without mastery of his own tools and a crappy memory stick.

In the spirit of optimism and embracing change, I gave Windows Live Writer another try and I was surprised that most of the frustrations I experienced months ago are now fixed in the latest version of Live Writer!

Live Writer will now “automatically” detect your blog settings and make the appropriate change for you! It’s the perfect WYSIWYG experience. It’s like using Microsoft Word – the familiar feel of "Word” is everywhere. I will go out on a limb here and say that it’s like Microsoft Word for blogging.

The software is so great that I can even do inline images now (like so! Look Ma, no hands!) As a bonus to developers, Live Writer is extensible which mean that you can write your own extensions for it! But before you do, check the online gallery first because someone might have already written it. I’ve already downloaded the Polaroid Picture plug-in which is responsible for the nice Polaroid picture effect on the image above and the Insert Videos plug-in which allows me to embed Youtube Videos quickly!

Never mind the awesome plug-ins ecosystem for Live Writer, the WYSIWYG perfection should be enough to make you jump ship! Allow me to demonstrate (and test this baby for the first time):

Text effects: Bold, Italic, Underlined, Strikethrough

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

• This
• is
• a
• bulleted
• item
• list

1. One
2. Two
3. Three

This is a quote!

This is a hyperlink.

PS: Me trying out to edit an existing blog post via Live Writer.

And all this without typing a single HTML code. Here’s the screenshot of the editor (compare it with the actual post and you will be amazed!):

However, its not always rainbows and roses. Live Writer have some downsides, too. And if we’re talking about downsides, we can never exclude the dreaded XMLRPC problems. Personally, I have resolved most of my XMLRPC problems but I can’t seem to fix a particular XMLRPC problem related to retrieving my previous blog posts (useful for referencing your old posts). Good thing that there’s a manual workaround; but if you’re patient, you can try to fix the problem by editing some PHP scripts and disabling a handful of Wordpress plug-ins.

Another downside is that Live Writer doesn’t support the "All-in-One SEO Pack” Wordpress plug-in by default, so you have to download a “bridge” before you can add the SEO details using Live Writer. For the lazy and untrusting ones, there’s a manual workaround. Publish your post as draft and add the SEO details via the Wordpress dashboard. That way, you’ll be sure that the SEO will really work.

Just like most Microsoft products, installing Live Writer will also install unwanted software so be sure to uncheck them during installation.

Live Writer is an awesome offline editor for Wordpress on its own merits. If you don’t believe me, try it out for a spin! It’s free!

Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade, Pain in the as*

A number of things had gone wrong during the upgrade:

1. During the automatic upgrade of my plugins, some of them didn’t restart succesfully on their own so I have to manually activate them agian.
2. Some widgets were removed. Needed to re-add it manually again (Most Viewed Widget).
3. My custom smiley was erased. Need to re-upload them again.
4. The Wordpress editor (TinyMCE Editor) font had defaulted back to its original font (Times New Roman, 12px). This is frustrating because I totally forgot how to set the editor font. You need to manually match the editor font to the blog font to have the WYSIWIG effect. (For my future reference, the settings are in wp-includes/js/tinymce/themes/advanced/skins/wp_theme/content.css . You need to click “Save Draft” after making the css changes to see its effect!)
5. After upgrading to Wordpress 2.8, I checked to see if IE 8 will display the site properly (thankfully it did!). However, I noticed that my blog is now serving ads from specificclick.net! (I wasn’t able to notice the pop-up ad from Firefox because I’m using Ad Block Plus). At first, I thought that my friend’s hosting service / contract has changed and is now injecting ads into my blog (talked to him and he said that he hasn’t done anything). Then, I suspected that one of the plugin owners got broke and decided to sell ads thru their plugins… So I deactivated all plugin to no avail. So then I suspected that Wordpress 2.8 might be serving the ads (how pathetically stupid of me, Wordpress wouldn’t do that!). So after a few hours of searching, I found out that SiteMeter is the one who is serving unsolicited ads from my site! (Don’t worry kids, I already replaced the JS code with the HTML code to block the ads. More info about the scandal here.)

I have also added the Global Translator plugin (see footer) to boost traffic. (Hey, not everyone can read Engrish! )

I haven’t checked every function of the blog yet. So if you find something that looks broken, please hit the comments! Thanks!

PS (totally unrelated): Yuri is so freakin’ cute! New SNSD single out on June 25!

Top 1 result in Google!

I have not really believed in those “free” SEO optimization tools. But it works! In fact, I just bought the domain 2 weeks ago and upped this blog just a couple of days ago and Google is already crawling my site.

I checked my SiteMeter stats just now and saw three incoming referrals from Google with search terms like:

• Accenture Student Leadership Conference 2009
• accenture slc 2009 friendster
• Cristopher Ian Uy (Probably my search)

Also, there is a referral for “Top Salary” from Topblogs.ph and another referral from http://accenture.cymfony.com (Accenture’s outsourced email server?). Maybe someone inside Accenture saw my blog post about leadership that also talks about SLC 2009.

I just have a little problem with how Google indexes my site. If you try to Google “site:ianuy.com”, you will see that Google only indexed http://blog.ianuy.com and not the individual posts. I don’t know why Google is doing this but I hope its a temporary thing since Google’s crawler is still crawling my entire site.

The site is doing fine in terms of hits. Got 70 uniques today.

Democrats!

Just a quick note that I have re-upped our section site on my server! Everything looks crappy though since I haven’t touched/edited anything for historical sake (To sorta remind everyone how Web 1.0 looked like).

Visit the site @ http://ianuy.com/democrats/

BTW, you can also watch the Grad. Ball coverage there.

Oh sweet memories.

Migration Successful!

F*ck Multiply! How hard could it be to add an export function? It took me 4 hours just to manually migrate 9 posts and it does not *look* good.

Anyway, all of the 9 posts below are from my old blog at Multiply. Please forgive the tiny font size, I’m still trying to figure out how to change the font style of my posts. As of the moment, I’m using Windows Live Writer to publish my posts as it provides an easier way to change font styles.

All of my new blog posts will be posted here. I will still be maintaining my old blog over at Multiply but I will only post excerpts there that will link to the full post here.

By the way, if you have any HDR images of the Metro Manila skyline (Makati, Ayala, Taguig, Ortigas), please send me a high-resolution copy and I will turn that into a beautiful banner that I can use. Don’t worry, I’ll credit you.

How do you guys like my logo?

At last! After 8 hours of hard work, I’m now done setting up WordPress. The WordPress installation per se didn’t eat up much time, nor did the Themes and Plugins installation, but the personalization and setup did.

I took the time to properly configure everything before migrating my contents so that everything will just be perfect after migration. I installed and configured all of the standard stuffs like the All-in-One SEO Optimization pack, Akismet Anti-spam and this very beautiful theme (and additional widgets).

Hopefully, the migration will be done tomorrow. But for now, it’s time for me to own someones a$$ in DOTA.

Again,

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");