I have moaned publicly about how difficult I find it to author technical chunks of material in my blog (maths, computer code, chemistry). Yesterday I responded to Peter Sefton’s post about his editor ICE by saying it was a Good Thing but also suggesting that there wasn’t much I could do to promote it. Now he has truly caught me. In his post: ICE as a blog editor he suggest that I can use ICE as an auxiliary editing tool:
Also yesterday I wrote about how we are breaking ICE up into more digestible pieces, one of which is the ability to post to a weblog using Atompub. Daniel de Byl has just posted a demo using OpenOffice.org Writer to publish a nicely formatted blog post to WordPress.
And today a supportive reply from PMR to my post with a poem in it! Thing do indeed take time, I’ve been at this since 1996. I think we’re getting there now, though.
I thought I’d try out the new ICE services using one of Peter’s posts and see what happens. I think that the ICE toolbar in Writer could help transcend the formatting problems with WordPress and we could look at doing interesting stuff like CML integration.
Here’s his post (embedded in mine as a blockquote)
[snipped]
PMR: It certainly looks OK (well mine wasn’t properly formatted and it has captured that exactly).
Easy enough to do in ICE apart from the slightly clunky way quoting works. We really need the ability to import HTML properly formatted as a blockquote. This would be very important for PMR, as he likes to quote big chunks.
PMR: Gulp. Everyone tells me I quote too much. They must be right.
[snip]You can see a draft version of this here post on my test blog.
If you want to try this out and blog to WordPress from OpenOffice.org then see the instructions that Daniel has put up on the ICE site and remember this is bleeding-edge alpha-quality Windows-only software at this stage. Remember also to actually read the instructions. The URL to use for WordPress is really important, for example.
PMR: Bleeding edge. My favourite sort of system. But since I can’t do XML at all it may liberate me to write some CML.
Even if I didn’t want to I am going to have to start Eating one’s own dog food or at least Peter’s. I am sure it is Good For Me. Let’s hope it also tastes nice!