covidimus.net

This is a test of using Windows Live Writer to post to the blog.  At first glance, I am impressed.  The interface is clean (but, once again, seems to have been written with some custom set of UI widgets that Microsoft hasn’t made available to the rest of us in standard Windows Forms ).

“Save as Draft” didn’t work as expected…I had hoped that it would literally save the draft in WordPress, just as if I’d clicked “Save as Draft” while editing in the normal web-based WordPress editor, but it doesn’t appear to have done so.  There is a “Post Draft to Weblog” option in the Publish menu which might do what I expected “Safe as Draft” to do, but there must be a configuration error, because I’m getting a network error when I try it.

On the plus side, inserting a picture is much easier with this tool than with the standard WordPress editor:

 (Update: When I tried to actually post this, I kept getting a network error until I removed the image I had added right here.  So my WordPress installation doesn’t like whatever Live Writer is doing to send the image up to the server.  Will have to figure that out…)

The default editing view, Web Layout, is excellent.  WLW inspected my blog automatically when I first set it up to find what the background of the site looks like, and shows that as the background while I type, so the results are much more WYSIWYG.  (It got the formatting for that link correct, too).  “Normal” view seems to be included just for completeness (though I suppose some people might like it).  “HTML” view might sometimes come in handy, but what’s really nice is “Web Preview” view, which shows what the post will look like integrated with the rest of the content of the site’s front page.

So far, it looks like WLW is an excellent example of the kind of rich-client application that is much harder or impossible to do quite as well in HTML, even with AJAX.  I don’t see anything in this UI that would be completely impossible with AJAX, but the application’s is just large enough that developing it in JavaScript could quickly turn nightmarish.

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Got this question today:

I just downloaded your transparent putty program. It is great and it is just what I was looking for. I have a tranparent version of “aterm”, but was experiencing refresh issues with it. Anyway my reason for writing to you is that whenever I run the transparent putty program with “Desktop” selected in the Background option and Opacity set to 0, my putty cursor disappears. I think that the cursor transparency also depends on the opacity value you set. Would you know of a way that I might be missing to make the cursor independent of the opacity value? Thanks

His analysis is correct: the cursor transparency uses the opacity. That was a consequence of the way PuTTY draws the cursor. I never really experienced that as a problem b/c I always use an opacity of about 50 or 75. I am mostly posting this as a way to remind myself to try check out whether this will be easy to fix, the next time I’m able to work on my PuTTY transparency patch. (Which probably will be at least a few months still…being employee #2 at a new company and, more importantly, having a 3-month-old son, tends to eat up all of one’s time).

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