In this article I will talk about how to use www.blogger.com publishing features to make it easy to publish articles on the web.
I believe many users use the WYSIWYG editing that is on the blogger.com webpage. This editor is an easy way to publish small amounts of text, but if you want to do more with the formatting of your blogs this is editor not good enough.
Also, as we all are aware of - Blogger is Google quality software - it buggy and often down. Usually you can send emails and your blog will be added as soon as blogger is up and running again.
In this article I will talk about how I use blogger.com to publish my stuff. I will show you how to make the most out of existing tools with the goal of making good presentation of your content. Everything on this page is with the old version of Blogger. Your mileage may vary with the new version.
For this article to work - or at least the examples I talk about - you need to enable the email option for your blog site. This is done in a few easy steps when Blogger is up and running. Go into Blogger control panel -> into your site -> email. You will find something called Mail-to-Blogger Address. You will have to choose publish and type in a password to use. When this is done you can send emails to username.password@blogger.com.
First I want to give you an overview on your options
| Feature | Usage |
| Outlook (any other HTML compliant email client should work) | I compose my blogs using Outlook. I format the text and images I want to use in the email and just send it away to blogger when I am done. |
| FrontPage | FrontPage is a very good HTML editor that makes it easy for you to use many advanced HTML features, like tables, bullets, inline frames and so on. You can work in the design mode of FrontPage, and when you are done simply use File|Send to email the HTML document to Blogger. Blogger will then remove everything outside the <body> part of your HTML file and publish only your text. |
Including pictures
I am very found of using pictures in blogs. Just remember not to use too many, as I tend to do. Read here on how to get good clipart cheap and legal. Using clipart or any other good looking images in your blogs give you space and attracts users. I believe most readers will jump over your text if you write too much dense text.
I do not use blogspot.com to host my images. So whenever I include images of some kind in my blogs I place them - in advance - on a server at my hosting provider. This way I can include pictures both in emails and via FrontPage without any hassle. Blogger does not support images attached in emails at this time.
Outlook
Outlook supports HTML, plain text and HTML formatting of outgoing messages. To swich to the right mode just open the Format menu when you are composing a new message and choose HTML. You can now type whatever you want and do whatever you can do to format the text in Outlook. If formatting like bold face, italics or font color is of any issue on the article you are writing on you can choose plaintext as format.
You will shortly realize that Outlook has really limited capabilities for formatting text the way you want. At least with Outlook 2003. You can not make tables or make the infamous rel="nofollow" tag. But for easy small snippets of text Outlook is king!
Images can be inserted, and you have to type in the URL of the image that is on a external server.
Microsoft FrontPage
FrontPage is a very good tool. You can do many cool things with it. Most of the HTML language is available from FrontPage, and the stuff you can't find you can edit as HTML code.
Format the text as you want and choose File|Send when you are done. Blogger will remove everything except for the text (between the <body> tags) and publish it on the web.
You can not make custom style sheets as they are removed.
External links
Tags at Technorati: blogger, Microsoft FrontPage, publish blogs
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