12 August 2007

[design, bloggage] More Blogging with Contribute CS3

902. One thing that experimenting with Adobe Contribute CS3 has done for me is really fire up my blogging frequency (even if it hasn't gotten my any more links or readers–when are you people going to reward my constancy and genius, huh?) as I learn to really have fun with it.

I still have not solved the problem of posting pictures to the blog through Contribute. I suspect it may be a little intractable–the blog is a remote thing, and the picture is a local thing, and putting it into the blog does not upload it to Blogger's image server; since the uploaded image is not a local file anymore, you cannot edit in Contrubute. These functions are, as far as I can tell, truly come into play when all your content is local, such as editing websites (which was Contribute's original remit) or if you hosted your blog locally. I don't know if the behavior changes if you host an FTP blog via Blogger.

The reason I realized that this tool may be becoming more than a passing fancy is twofold. First, I'm having a lot of fun doing it; as I said previously, entering content in a nearly-WYSIWYG environment is much easier on the eyes than Blogger's interface, which is frustrating in Safari. Second, Contribute, despite the things I can't get it to do for me yet, enables me to do things that the Blogger interface just doesn't without handcoding some HTML.

Handcoding HTML doesn't scare me–but when you're in a writing mode it is, at best, inconvenient and at worst, irritating.

One thing Contribute allows me to do that reduces to a keypress and a click? I can now make links open in a new window by going Insert>Link>Browse To Web Page..., CMD-V to copy the URL into the box, then going to the Advanced section (open the flippy triangle) and simply selecting New Window from the Target dropdown.

This, my friends, is powerful and cool.

Blogging with Adobe Contribute CS3...this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, albeit with a side-trip to Safari to upload images.

Technorati Tags: ,,,,

2 comments:

Iron Fist said...

Oh, jeez. Listen, I'm going to do some tinkering around with my site this coming week and I'll add a link to you then. I promise.

Samuel John Klein said...

Aww, shucks. That's too cool of you. Thanks, friend.