There Must Be a Better Way

It’s been a challenging week for me. The easy part was “outing” myself. That hard part was...I’ll come to that soon, see item #3. I’ll have a more contentive (content + substantive) post in the next few days.

1. Not sure what to make of this. Not trying to show off. But this is an interesting analysis by iNDi Business Solutions of how Guy Kawasaki is kicking Kawasaki’s butt on the Internet. At the very least, it shows what one Guy with a big mouth and a blog can do. Perhaps I should complain to ICANN that Kawasaki Motors is squatting on a domain that I should rightly own. :-)

2. The guys at Jajah have been busy. They just added a FireFox plug-in. With this plug-in, phone numbers that are on web pages are automatically detected and highlighted. When clicked, Jajah initiates a phone call from your phone—landline or mobile—to the desired destination.

3. This was the hard part of the week. Call me clueless. Call me pathetic. But for the life of me, I cannot figure this out. All I want to write my blog entries (while offline) in a more or less WYSIWYG mode. You know, where bold looks bold; italics look italics; ordered lists look like ordered lists; bulleted lists look like bulleted lists; you create hyperlinks by selecting text and adding the URL; and there are automatic smart quotes and em dashes. Then I want to copy the text and paste it into TypePad as HTML without funky stuff happening.

   I spent hours this week trying to find something to do this. I don’t want to learn HTML—this is 2006, so on principle no one should have to learn HTML to do what I want to do. I have tried about ten different programs—all the obvious choices that VersionTracker reveals. Let’s just say that my experience could be a Clint Eastwood movie called, “The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy.”

   This posting, believe it or not, was done this way: drafted in TextEdit, saved as HTML, opened with TextEdit Plus (which is a fabulous little editor), cleaned up, pasted into TypePad, and posted. What the shiitake am I missing? As Steve Jobs would say, “There must be a better way.”

   I know that Word can save-as HTML, but have you seen the resulting file? It would make a posting like this look like War and Peace. For example, the sentence, “There must be a better way” has twenty one characters. The Word HTML file with only the “display information” (that is, less stuff) has 1,122 characters! As Bill Gates would say, “There must be our way.”

   Please send suggestions. I’m so desperate (and I’m so impressed with Parallels) that I would even consider a Windows application to do this. God forbid.

4. Check out this great story about iStockphoto at Wired. It’s called “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” I love iStockphoto; it is a role model for every startup because it’s outside of Silicon Valley, and it took no outside capital. The picture that you see in almost every posting is from the company (did you think I already had a picture of a jarful of shiitake mushrooms?). If nothing else, “crowdsourcing” is a very clever term. Almost as clever as the new spin on “linkware” that you will learn about next week.

Comments

[dmain]

This little program may do it fine....I've used it in the past. It's been around for a long time so is stable.

Dennis

[Stefan/Futurelab]

Guy,

We use the plugin FCKEditor within Movable Type, and it works perfectly - exactly as you describe it. That's how we edit your posts (pics namely) to fit with our design - all in very nice and easy WYSYWIG.

[Nik]

For blog posting, Ecto, MarsEdit and MacJournal can all do what you want. All are free to try and relatively inexpensive.

There are also some decent Wysiwyg editor plug ins for Movable Type and other blogging programs which permit pasting in rich text (to varying degrees) such as TinyMCE and HTMLTextArea. Dunno if these can be attached to a TypePad blog, however. In any case, none of them work very well with Safari, so you're looking at IE (for the PC)/Firefox or variants thereof.

[Graydon]

I second the idea of using NVU. I don't use it on my sites... but when I need a pc of html code I have used it and copied it over very easily.

[Jonathan Ellis]

Another anti-shiitake vote. :)

[john t unger]

Guy,

ecto does do all the things you want (and more). It's cheap, easy and will spare you learning html.

There are a few things that I find kinda buggy in ecto, but only because I want to do extensive html in it (Paypal buttons, tables, etc).

What I like best is that it allows you to keep an archive of all your entries on your hard drive. Which makes me feel much more secure about my data.

[Fábio Resende]

I would vote for Ecto also.
It works very well, its inexpensive and it allows you to upload pictures with your post.
Performancing plug-in for Firefox is nice also, but it's text only. You'll have to know HTML to put a picture in your post.

[Ken Molay]

Although we are in danger of a major threadjacking here, I have to lend my support to Geva Perry's comment about shiitake. It's massively overused in this blog and always pulls me away from the content and intent of the entry. I perceive it as childish and cutesy, which is such a departure from the usually erudite writing in the rest of the entry. You don't have to say shit at all. If you don't like the concept, just don't use such a phrase. The communications effectiveness of a "shiitake phrase" is only valid if your reader knows you are making a reference to shit anyway, so you haven't really spared anybody the horror of thinking about a "nasty" word. Say what you mean, or say something else. Saying it while not saying it seems like a leftover from talking to your children about making tinky-winky.

[Nancy McGough]

If you use an email client that works when you're offline and lets you compose HTML messages, you could use that. One of these days (maybe soon), all email clients will be able to consume and produce feeds. At least, that's my prediction :-).

[MJ]

Add another vote for Ecto. Better, IMO, than most.

[Nicola Mattina]

I suggest you Performancing, a plug in for Firefox. It has good wysiwyg features, it is free and you can write while surfing and reading content in the same window.
If you want to use Word to write, forget to copy and paste because what yuo past is full of hidden styles. You have to "reset" the styles, ie copying and pasting your text into notepad and then again from notepad to Performancing when you can add styles.
Ciao ciao
Nicola

[foo]

You should get a wiki plugin with a reasonable wiki syntax (MoinMoin uses a consistent and fairly intuitive one, see http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/). Possibly one that supports reStructured Text (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html).

I know it's not WYSIWYG, but it's close in that what you type gives you visual cues as to how things will look like in the finished version. To me, that's even better, because I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard to touch the mouse.

Get someone to write you a plugin for that sort of thing is what I'd suggest.

[Kevin Marks]

Another vote for ecto - it is an excellent tool, and has lots of nice stuff built in (eg tags, and an 'insert book from Amazon' widget.

[Geva Perry]

Guy --

Why do you keep saying shiitake instead of shit? It's childish and silly. You write so brilliantly (content and language), but frankly, this mushroom shit is annoying. Just use the proper word and be done with it.

Noone who matters will think less of you.

[Dazza]

Re: iStockPhoto

If you had joined their affilliate program, you would now be up $5, I signed up using your link. Call iStockPhoto, they owe you a coffee, deluxe one at that.

http://www.istockphoto.com/referral_program.php

[Katinka Hesselink]

Are you saying typepad doesn't come with WYSIWYG editing?

[bwedwards]

I've tried several and settled on BlogJet.

[Guy Kawasaki]

Everyone,

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm trying MarsEdit for the next few days. I had the demo verson before--I don't remember why I stopped using it.

So far, the only things it can't do that I would like are:

- Smart quotes and apostrophes
- Em dashes

Also, I don't understand why I have to use a menu item or shortcut to invoke a new paragraph.

But I can live with these shortcomings.

Thanks!

Guy

[Morgan]

Oh, yes, I know you said you wanted an offline editor. You can install WAMP (www.en.wampserver.com), then install an offline version of WordPress, and work with blog entries offline.

[Tom Hippensteel]

RapidWeaver from Realmac...

A new version will be released on Friday, June 2nd. It's quick, easy, and has plenty of features.

Give it a shot...

[Morgan]

Forget about TypePad. Get WordPress at www.wordpress.org. WordPress comes default with a WYSIWYG editor. My company's website will soon be powered by WordPress, as will my music website.

[Patrix]

Ecto is fine but isn't there anything that is free that would do the job just as well?

[Omer Trajman]

I just downloaded a trial of Elicit (http://www.bingobangosoftware.com/) which is for Windows. I'm not sure I like the Calendar centric approach but the editor looks promising.

[Mike]

Ditto on ecto. You'll dig it.

[Jay Gilmore]

Guy,
I think you have left out the point which you mentioned in a post early-on about you having your posts proofread prior to publishing. If you are still doing this -- you will have issues. If you are not, I don't know why you wouldn't just continue to use Qumana and save your posts as drafts and edit them inline. Ecto does seem to have some nice custom HTML features so you could us it to autofill your em-dashes but read on
on my opinion of smart-quotes.

I have been pondering this problem on blog formatting for a while. I have a client who has blog and I have to do the posts because of issues of the Windows text encoding and consequent formatting placed on it by Outlook Express to render it in HTML in his emails. If I copy and paste it is full of junk. I don't know why plain text can't be sent output in a broad standard such as iso-8859-1 or utf-8 instead of Win-1252 or some other proprietary formatting.

BTW give up on smart-quotes and replaced right-single-quotes that act as apostrophes. MS and other word-processor developers have tricked us into thinking we need to have smart-quotes. Vertical double quotes are ubiquitous on the web so who cares if smart quotes can't be placed into plain HTML.

I wholeheartedly agree on the em dash though -- I feel that the people who developed the character sets for the web should have read Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" and then included all the punctuation. I usually just find-and-replace either the double-hyphen or the non-compatible character version from MSWord with the mdash character code to make it work.

All the best,

Jay