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Blog this button for OpenOffice.org (well half anyway)

2005-09-05

Last year Tim Bray wrote about OpenOffice.org, and suggested that,

Geeks like me are fine with writing in Emacs, but lots of people seem to like writing in word processors, and as of this week, I think that any word processor without a “Blog This” button is just broken.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/03/26/OpenOffice

I'm one of those people who likes writing in word processors. See, I told you I wasn't a geek.

As far as I know most word processors are still broken (is there a "Blog this!" button available for Word, AbiWord, OpenOffice.org etc? Google search for '"blog this" button word processor' gets you my site so maybe not.) But I finally made myself a "Blog this!" button.

I have been working with a team from USQ on a system called ICE. ICE is an open source content management system designed mainly to work with courseware. It can take a bunch of OpenOffice.org Writer files that happen to be under Subversion control (Subversion is a version control system used mainly by programmers) and automatically generate HTML renditions for each document. It can organize packages of content so they can be published as stand-alone, or for deliver through a Learning Management System, but it can also just take a directory of word processing documents and turn them all into HTML.

This document is the first one I wrote for my blog in OpenOffice and published with the 'Bog this!' button. Here's what I did.

  1. Today I added a few lines of code to an ICE configuration file so that any item of content can be sent to the Leonardo-powered site you're looking at. This was really simple; I just copied the 'draft' form straight out of Leonardo and added it my site. Five minutes work for any competent programmer. About half an hour for me. This will show up in ICE when it's properly sorted.

  2. Tonight when I got home I added a blog directory to my subversion working copy I keep for all my articles, half written songs and so on. This means that I can get to it on any of my computers, or check it out at work over the 'net. ICE can take care of the subversion commands for you but I typed this:

    $ mkdir blog $ svn add blog A blog

  3. I opened Writer and started a new document. Because I have the ICE template installed I can format stuff using the styles set up in ICE and have my documents come out as XHTML. (Did I mention before that it's a good idea to Use Styles?)

    For example this paragraph is in style li1p – that's a paragraph, p that's part of a first level list item, li. The above paragraph is li1n where the n is for number. Above that we have pre2, for preformatted text. I can apply all these styles either through a custom menu, like the one I wrote about on xml.com or using the keyboard.

    You can check for yourself if you're interested in this stuff that the XHTML is pretty neat, although it may have some stray namespace declarations that don't belong because of the way I hooked this all up.

  4. I typed this out, saved it in my blog directory, then used my local ICE site to view it as HTML. ICE runs as a local web server. When I was happy, after seeing the web preview a few times, I clicked the "Blog this!" button and it presented me with a pre-filled form that sent the content to my Leonardo blog site. There it became a draft and I had only to look it over and click one more button.

  5. I rejoiced. I'd much rather work in a word processor than muck around with wiki formatting.

Future improvements in ICE will mean I could work in Microsoft Word using the same set of styles. I might choose to do this for longish documents with complex heading structure 'cos Writer's outliner is terrible, but otherwise Writer is fine. And I would definitely choose Writer for book-length content where I want to use master documents to tie-together small pieces, and get PDF renditions for free without mucking around with add-ins. It's probably possible to put the 'Blog this!' button into Office, but I'm happy with where it is on my ICE web site, where I can preview my content.

Future developments in Leonardo will add support for the Atom Publishing Protocol, then I won't have to steal a form from Leonardo. When I get around to writing it I will be able to use a standard bit of code to talk to any Atom-compliant blogging software.