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

[Todd S.]

ecto.
ecto.
ecto.

I have tried the others and nothing works as well.

[Steve]

Try NVU (free open source wysiwyg) http://www.nvu.com/download.php

Just make what you want then switch to source view and copy paste, that should quite easily do the trick.

[andrew]

I'm confused, I would assume you want something like ecto which so many others have already mentioned here.

But you already appear to use it as documented in previous posts:

Jan 16 - The Education of a Late-Adopter Blogger
April 11 - The First 100 Days: Observations of a Nouveau Blogger

So there must be something I am missing.

[Iain Robertson]

A good friend of mine works for a company called Ephox, who have a WYSIWYG text editor (EditLive!), which I believe would meet your needs.

I think however that it requires some server-side integration, so I'm not sure how useful that'd be in your situation?

[Virginia van Santen]

This might have all you geeks hooting with laughter, but I write my posts in a Stickie note on my Mac. After checking it, I copy and paste it into my blog and post it.

[Raymond Brigleb]

Guy, I'm a web designer but I can empathize with the difficulty you describe. Typically I use a formatting scheme called Textile. You can just use it on this web page, in fact:

http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/

But really, the posts above about using Ecto or MarsEdit are right on. That's the way to go from your desktop. They can be tricky to set up, but you only have to do it once.

[Adam]

Hi Guy:

Please sacrifice 2 days out of one of your one of your vacations and read:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321392280/sr=8-2/qid=1148686498/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-7732867-8980803?%5Fencoding=UTF8
and markup some webpages.

Forget WYSIWYG editors and go with the real stuff...WYTIWYG

Adam

[Chris Marsden]

I thought that I had gotten qumana from a link on your site. Are you not liking it? Why? I think it rocks and it plays well with WordPress. I haven't tried copying and pasting the html, but I haven't had a need. You can save a post locally, then publish it when you are done.

[DM]

MarsEdit does everything you need and suppports posting directly to TypePad. It's made by the same folks who do NetNewsWire which is a fantastic RSS reader...

[John Lilly]

For blog posting, I've been using Ecto to Typepad for a long time now. It's the best I can find. http://ecto.kung-foo.tv. Dev is supported by Joi Ito, and a universal binary is coming soon.

With the Jajah extension for Firefox, it's getting better and better quickly. We @ mozilla have encouraged them to do this and they're doing great.

Everyone else with cool potential integration into the browser: take a look at how Jajah, del.icio.us and others are building great extensions that aren't just more toolbars!

[Iain]

Why don't you try MacJournal? It's a great little editor for updating blogs and just keeping notes. The creator, Dan Schimpf, used to give it away, but now it's sold by Mariner Software (www.marinersoftware.com).

[Jeremy Wright]

Um, why use an HTML editor at all? If you're creating a blog post why not use a desktop blog publishing tool (qumana is my personal favorite, but there are dozens).

Get the WYSIWYG. Get the ability to just hit "post" from the software and have it go up. Get the ability to save pictures and drafts and such.

Right tool for the right job Guy :)

[Chris. F. Masse .COM]

I use NVu (nvu.com) as my HTML editor. Then I copy the code source and paste it in my RSS feed generator.

More info in the URL under my name.

[Paul]

"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."

You dont know HTML? What could be more simple?

Entrepreneurs obviously want a VC that more then superficially understands the technology. Guy, really you dont know HTML, please tell me it's not so...

Please dont be just another valley non-tech guy that hitched a ride...PLEASE.

[Edwin Khodabakchian]

I recently switched from a PC to a Mac (and I love it). The best solution I found for clean WYSIWYG HTML editing on Mac is Macromedia Dreamweaver. There is a 30 day trial. I ended up buying it ($499). I have been happy with it so far. -Edwin

[Tim Windsor]

Another strong second for MarsEdit. It does all you want, and you don't even have to paste it into Typepad - you're editing "in" Typepad even while you're offline. MarsEdit takes care of all the syncing for you.

[Robert Padbury]

You should most definitely check out Ecto. I bought it a while ago, and it sounds like exactly what you describe. You can also edit it in HTML mode so you can see exactly what code it's producing.

Here's the URL: http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/

Oh, and it's on Mac. :o)

[Jake Walker]

On #3: Have you tried MarsEdit from Ranchero Software (the guys who do NetNewsWire)?