Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

# Blogger for Word, Take 2 : When I first read about the Word/Blogger plug-in, I didn’t get it. Why would I want to publish a Word document to my blog? But now that I’ve played around with it, I see that what they meant to say was that you can post text that you author in Word to your blog. In other words, Word becomes your rich client blogging interface. Does it work? Well, how do you think I made this post?

Update: OK, a few problems. Word autocorrected the text smiley I typed, which rendered itself as a ). Also, you have to have a title for your post (which I typically don't). Another problem is with the "curly quotes" that Word insists on inserting, even though I’ve turned off the feature. (Maybe I need to restart Word for my changes to take effect?)

Update 2: There are two setting you need to change to get Word to stop using curly quotes: Options > Autoformat, and Options > Autoformat As You Type (the latter being the more important). The "required title" feature may be more problematic.

Update 3: Yeah, there is no way to create and edit posts in Word and leave the title blank. That's a drag, but maybe having to write titles for my posts is a good thing?

Ed Bilodeau

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

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