The perfect writing tool for bloggers
I spent yesterday in Melbourne, co-presenting a couple of sessions on Web Content Management at a seminar organized by Firmware Design, the Australian distributor of Ektron’s CMS products.
I’d flown down from Sydney the night before, which gave me the opportunity to have dinner with Bill Rogers, the Ektron CEO, who was in Australia to give the seminar keynote and to hold meetings with Firmware staff. Marius Coomans, Firmware’s managing director, is a big fan of weblogs (he and I did a shared blog for six months last year).
CMS awareness is only just starting to build in Australian and Marius believes (as I do) that weblogs will play an important part in making organizations aware of the benefits offered by content management. As more and more individuals use Movable Type, Blogger, and Radio to create and publish their own Web content, inevitably they will begin to ask their managers why the corporate Web site can’t be as easily maintained.
I wrote a post a few months ago, pointing out that I’d like to use Ektron’s eWebEditPro WYSIWYG browser-based editor instead of the Microsoft DHTML edit control employed by many weblogging tools. It was terrific to have the opportunity to discuss with Bill Rogers the kinds of features one could build into a fully-featured text editor for bloggers.
Currently I write each post in StoryView, format it and add the links in Dreamweaver, validate it as XHTML in CSE HTML Validator, paste the HTML into Movable Type’s entry text field, preview the post, and finally publish it. When I used Radio, I followed pretty much the same procedure.
eWebEditPro is a WYSIWYG editor that reads CSS style sheets (including custom styles), spellchecks interactively or on demand, produces valid XHTML, offers full image and table support, and is 508 compliant.
We’re running the Ektron seminar again in Sydney tomorrow so I’ll get another chance to chat with Bill about how eWebEditPro would be Heaven on a Stick for bloggers.
Jonathon, I just write in Dreamweaver's editor. With my CSS Styles menu box open. (Stop grinning. I said stop!)
I don't know if there's a spellchecker, but I almost never use one.
However--good to know there's a choice for the spelling-impaired. ;-)
Posted by: Meryl Yourish on 31 May 2002 at 01:11 AM