Blogging with Office 2007

A couple of weeks ago I posted a test post from Microsoft Word 2007. Pretty cool integration between Word and blogger. Since then I've also discovered that I can check blogs that I frequent with Outlook much like you would check your email. Soooo cool. Well today I thought I'd blog about how it works and how to set things up so other can enjoy the integration.

Note that you must have the latest version of Word and Outlook for any of this to work.

Posting with MS Word 2007

If you click the round button in the top left corner of Word you'll find the usual list of file options such has Open, Save, Print etc. There is one new option, however, called Publish. This button unlocks the ability to use Word as you blog entry editor.

When clicked you'll see three options one of which is Blog. Click it and you will be asked to setup a connection to your favorite blogging site. Choose you blog service, supply you username and password, choose the source and destination locations of images you will use in your entries and you're all set.

Now it's just a matter of typing in you blog entry and then clicking the Publish button when done. Note that you can choose Publish or Publish to Draft. Publishing will actually post you entry to the public blog space; Publish to Draft will save you entry to you blog but not post it for everyone to see.

You'll also notice in the ribbon bar along with the Publish button there are 4 other options in the Blog tab. Home Page lets you view your blog in its entirety. Open Existing lets you open draft and previously posted blog entries. Manage Accounts brings up a listing of you blogs and allows you to add new blogs.

 
 

Reading with Outlook 2007

If you think publishing with Word is cool lets discus what I personally think is much cooler and that's reading with Outlook.

First some background about how this works.

RSS is a standard method of posting information on a website usually used on site that disseminate information such as new sites or support sites. You may have noticed on these sites a small orange RSS icon or a link titled "Subscribe To" indicating that the site is indeed RSS compliant. Well if you look carefully at the Mail Folders list in the lower left corner of Outlook, you will see a new folder called RSS.

 
 

Within Outlooks RRS folder you can add any RSS competent sites and as Outlook polls the sites every x number of minutes, depending on your send/receive settings, it notifies you when new items are posted. In other words, it pretty much works exactly as with new email.

Guess what… Almost all blogging sites are RSS compliant. That's right you can add your favorite blogs to Outlooks RSS folder and then let outlook do all the work. No more launching a browser and navigating from blog to blog looking for updates. Way cool.

Setting this up is quite simple in Outlook 2007.

Navigate to the RSS folder, right click, choose Add New Feed and then enter the address provided to you from the blog site. How do you get this address? Simply click on the orange icon or the link marked Subscribe To. Copy the URL provided and paste it into the New RSS Feed dialog. Note that the Feed URL is not always the same as the actual website URL. For example the web URL for this blog is http://blog.rrkphotos.com/ whereas the Feed or RSS URL is http://blog.rrkphotos.com/feeds/posts/default.

Once setup you will notice a new folder under the RSS folder with the name of your blog. This folder is where updated entries are placed along with previous entries in the blog. Treat this folder just like you would any email folder. Click on an entry to read it in the reading pain or double click to open it in a new window. Notice that much of the web formatting is stripped but the content and photos are still there. If you need to see the post in its entirety you can click the View Article link at the bottom and launch the actual blog page itself.

One last tip/trick to make keeping track of all your blogs easy. Because the RSS folder is buried deep within the folder structure I suggest you add your blog folders to your Favorite Folders list. To do this, right click on the blog folder and choose Add to Favorite Folder list. This will place the folder in the list at the top right of Outlook just under you Inbox folder. Add all your important blogs and as new items are posted the folder name will turn bold and you can click on it to see the listing of new entries.

 
 

Enjoy.

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So first it was a blog and now its Facebook. Gaaaaaack…

First impressions… Not impressed. Great idea with lots of potential but poorly organized. Of course to all those who have been using it for a while think its fine but trust me it was clearly designed by the programmers who developed it. Nothing about it is all that intuitive.

I did figure out how to attach this blog to my Facebook page which is pretty cool. At least that way I don't have to keep up two sites. Just post here in the blog and it automatically updates my face book. Now that's how computers are suppose to work. ;-) I'm sure as I play with it I'll find other cool things but to be honest its all just a bit too much computer and communication for me.

That said Terry is having a blast finding all her old child hood friends. I think she's found just about her entire Mount Rainer gang. That pretty cool. I, on the other hand, have no desire to find old friends and those old friends who I do keep in touch with I do the old fashioned way… EMAIL!!!! ;-)

Testing… Is this thing working?

Well now this is very cool. I can use Microsoft Word 2007 to create new posts and edit old post on my blogs. As a test this is my first post via this method. Let's see how it works.

UPDATE: See here for instructions on how to set this up. Blogging with Office 2007

A little Java..... script can go a long way

Yes this is a post that only the geeks will appreciate. Sorry.


So I was bored this morning and while looking over my photo website I decided to add some code that would handle keyboard navigation with in the galleries. Added one function to handle the keyboard message and a line of code to each page and walla you can now navigate the galleries with out touching the mouse.

Move forward with the right arrow key, space bar, or the enter key
Move backwards with the left arrow key
Move to the first image with the up arrow or the home key
Move to the last image with the down arrow or the end key.


Fun, fun, fun. ;-)

Building a Photo Website

My photo website started well over a year ago with a thought and a concept. The thought? Well that came about as I was helping my cousin Mike with some issues on his site. As I was going over his images I thought, “It might be cool to build my own website for some of my photography.” The concept? Well that would evolve over time but basically I wanted a simple site, easy to navigate, and most of all a clean looking site that wasn’t cluttered with what you see on many sites today, animation (Flash), music, fancy typefaces, etc. The task was to create an attractive, well functioning site that would showcase the photography and not my abilities to create fancy websites.

The first thing to work out was a color scheme… Hmmm… what colors would help complement my work? I find that most images seem to pop when places on darker backgrounds so I picked a darker shade of gray to use as my background color. Then keeping in mind the goals, I decided a more monochromatic look would be best. It’s simple and won’t detract from the images.

Now design. Simple... It has to be simple. I don’t want the viewer distracted by design elements on the web page so I decided to use single line rules to separate the major sections of the page and to keep the header of the page as plain as possible. The same holds true for the font style used. I needed something easy to read but plain enough to keep the viewer interested in the photos and not the text. In my opinion, nothing says simple and plain, yet sophisticated then a Helvetica style font.

The other very important design item for me was that page movement, meaning the changing of height and width, had to be kept to an absolute minimum. Nothing is more distracting then when I click on a link and the next page is completely different than the page I just left. To this, my images must be the same size and display in the same place as the images before and after. If done properly the only thing that should look like it changed, as the viewer navigates, is the image itself.

Now to the photographs. How to organize them. How to display them. Again here the overall driving factor was simplicity. Too many categories or nested categories and the viewer will quickly get lost. Too few and the viewer will get bogged down in a single gallery that seem endless with images. So I settled on the simple. People, Places, and Things and then added Theater, Sports, and Wildlife. These 6 categories pretty much cover everything I shoot.

How many images per gallery was something of another matter altogether. My hope was to keep it down to 10 or 15 at most but when it came down to actually picking the photos I just couldn’t do it. So as it turns out each gallery has around 25 images. A few more then I intended but not too many assuming the images are interesting.

Ok so the goals and idea were set forth and it was time to create an actual design. I’ve found that Microsoft Publisher is an excellent tool to create design mockups. So using Publisher I created my first pass at the graphical design of the page. One particular reason why I like to use Publisher, and there are other tools that will do the same types of thing, is it’s very easy to work with color schemes and pull the hex values from those colors when it comes time to actually build the site in HTML. I can also create graphical elements such as rules and buttons and then export then to gif or jpg to be used in the HTML of a given page.

Now to translate the graphic design into an actual web page. I use Microsoft Front Page as my basic HTML editor. Again there are many other tools one could use but I find FrontPage more than sufficient for the type of website I build.

The first thing to do is break up the mockup into table and cell layout that represent the major sections of the page. Header, Body, Footer, Menu area, Image area, navigation area and so on. Using this basic table design I created a template page that each and every other page would be derived. This way I’m certain that all the pages are the same. I then created shared components such as menus and in this case the gallery HTML which are embedded into the template page, again assuring that every page is exactly the same. Making a change to the component is immediately reflected in every page using that component.

Next item to create was the code that drives the actual image galleries. I needed something simple that wouldn’t require major rewrites each time I added an image. The solution was quite simple. Create an array of images making sure the names of the images were simple, e.g. places-001.jpg and then write code that would cycle though that array within the gallery page, displaying each image. This way, to change an image all I need to do is replace an existing image with a new image making sure the new image has the same name as the old. Adding addition images is as simple as adding a line to the array code. Couldn’t be any simpler.

Formatting; let’s not forget about formatting. Font type, size, color, spacing, mouse over behavior and all other style behavior is defined in style sheets. By using styles there’s no reason to repeat formatting on each and every element, just assign the proper style and it looks and behaves just as it’s supposed to and constantly throughout the site. More importantly a simple change to a given style is applied to the entire site without the need to manually change the formatting throughout. This makes tweaking the appearance of the site a breeze; just edit the style sheet. Want to change a color? Change it in the style sheet. Want to change a typeface? Change it in the style sheet. Paragraph spacing? Style sheet. Border size and color? Style sheet. As long as you were diligent enough to use the styles throughout your entire site, the changes are applied as you tweak the style sheet.

Now assembly. With the template now containing all the functioning components, menu, gallery etc, and all the proper style defined and assigned, all that was required to create a specific gallery was to copy the template, renaming it appropriately, and then create the companion image array file. That’s it; a fully functioning gallery page that displays the images defined in its associated array file. Of course the images needed to be chosen and copied to the site but that’s another issue altogether.

Well now the pages are in place and working as prescribed but there aren’t any images. Uuuuggghhh. Now I have to go though all my images and pick out the best 25 of each category. Well it turns out that this process was more difficult than the creation of the site itself. So difficult in fact that I put it off for weeks, then months until I finally decided that I just needed to get it done. So over the past several days I sifted though about 4 years of images slowly but surely quelling them down to 6 categories of 25. Once each set was defined they needed to be resized, renamed, and copied to the website location, along with creating 6 array files reflecting the exact number of images per category.

Once all this was done the gallery page was ready to go and once all the galleries were done the website was finally completed.

So there you have it; how I created my new photography website. Of course I’ve left out a lot of detail such as the time and effort put into finding, writing and testing the actual code that drives everything but I hope after reading this you will have a better appreciation for what goes into designing and creating a well functioning and pleasing website. To which, I hope I’ve accomplished the goals set forth at the beginning of the project and indeed did create a well functioning, and simple site that is pleasing in design, function and forum.


Well here it is: RRK Photos

Enjoy.