Location Scout Resource: Internet Web Log (Blog) Authoring Tools
The competent 21st century freelance location scout, more and more each day, needs to be computer savvy and adept and communicating electronically, both as a job duties and unless having a fulltime location scouting job on staff with a studio or with a long-running show, as a marketing tool. Below are a couple of tolls I have found handy at one time or another along the way.
Location Scout Resource: WriteToMyBlog
Doesn’t have a whole lot to do directly with location scouting, but looks incredibly useful as a writing tool.
If you are a busy location scout but also like blogging about what you do, sometimes it gets tedious stopping in the middle of whatever you are working on to navigate to your blog / logging in / navigating to the admin panel / navigating to the editor / only then writing / editing / publishing that little gem of wisdom you hoped “would only take a minute…” 😉
WriteToMyBlog is a free web based word processor for your blog. Create post entries for your blog from right here, completely free, no membership required; can post to multiple blogs simultaneously, manage your posts; works with all major blog programs and is easy-peasy!
What’s “different” about the WriteToMyBlog application is it’s web-based, as opposed to being software you have to install and run locally or a browser addon, therefore relieving one’s self the annoyance of additional desktop clutter and memory / CPU usage.
I could take or leave the built-in TinyMCE editor, one thing I actually really like about WordPress’s post / page editor is the plain-text / code editor – it’s just the extra 2-3 clicks then waiting for my server to load everything up to get to it when I am in a hurry that gets frustrating sometimes.
So here goes my first post using WriteToMyBlog…
Post-blog-posting analysis:
- …that was pretty painless. interestingly, WriteToMyBlog uses Technorati tags – I still have to add in my own site tags
- nothing was tweeted to Twitter – but that is probably a bug of the Twitter Updater – if you can call it a bug – del.icio.us‘s daily links postings never get tweeted either.
And then, sometimes, we don’t always “see the forest for the trees” – umm, I just bookmarked the “new post page” at nyc.locationscout.us …duh…
…now back to our regularly-scheduled programming…
Location Scout Resource: Microsoft Windows Live Writer
It’s true what they say and now I’ll say it some more – Windows Live Writer is very kewl (if you use Windows 😉 . (Try this if you are looking for an offline blog editor for your Mac)
Windows Live Writer is an offline blog editor – it really is just "best of show" and about 100x better than the native post editor built into WordPress, my web publishing platform of choice.
…some reasons why I like Windows Live Writer:
- WLW is fast – it runs off my computer’s cpu and not my ISP’s server bandwidth
- no need to be online while editing
- elegant interface
- WLW breaks links at the end of linked words / phrases automatically – I wish I could get Gmail to do that
- large development and support community which translates into lots of plugins and extra features
- WLW is FREE 😉
- unlike a lot of M$ gigs, WLW seems to play by the same rules and plays well with the rest of "the gang"
Thank you I’ll get off my soapbox now and get back to the regular location scout programming.
Windows Live Writer – Wikipedia
Windows Live Writer, developed by Microsoft, is a desktop blog-publishing application that is part of the Windows Live range of products. It features WYSIWYG authoring, photo-publishing and map-publishing functionality, and is currently compatible with Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint blogs, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Telligent Community, PBlogs.gr, JournalHome, the MetaWeblog API, the Movable Type API, Blogengine, Squarespace and all blogs that support RSD (Really Simple Discoverability).
