Ink Bogging for the People

Ed Holloway, author of the Ink Blog plug-in

for Window Live Writer, has posted step-by-

step instructions on his blog for setting up

a free FTP site so that you can use

Live Writer to post images (along with you

text) to Blogger, easily and quickly;

bringing Ink Blogging to the masses!

Ain't it cool?

If This Works...

Where Ink Lives

In my last post, I bemoaned the paucity of ink on this tablet pc/creative writing blog, and you know what, someone read it. Not just someone, but none-other than the duke of digital blogging his bad self, Sumocat! Sumocat has been instrumental in making ink blogging a reality. He's shown us the way, by example, and by providing the community with a road map. So if you're interested in seeing what could be, check out his highly entertaining blog, Sumocat's Scribbles!

Why So Little Ink?

Okay, that's a good question. I really do want to post some of these missives straight from my Tablet PC, in my own handwriting, in digital ink. And I should be able to. Microsoft has a KILLER blogging tool called Windows Live Writer...it's still in Beta, but it's pretty rock solid. It let's you manage all your blogs from a single app, with drag-and-drop simplicity. And get this -- it pulls in the template you're using, so you're creating the blog wysiwyg -- same fonts, colors, etc of the resultant post. Now that's just cool. But the coolest bit of all? Some intrepid soul (Ed Holloway) wrote a free plugin for the Tablet PC that makes it a snap to handwrite your post and then post it to your blog.

Well, most blogs. It turns out that in order to be able to upload pictures to Blogger we'll need a public API, and the Blogger/Google folks haven't provided one yet. So you can do this with most blogs, but not Blogger. I was hoping their new software would do the job, but alas, it hasn't. So here I am, singing the tablet praises in ... text.

Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?

I'm considering moving to a more upload-friendly site for my blog. Seems like a lot of work though, and I'm just getting it going here, so I don't know when/if that will happen. Probably will break down one evening and have a go at it, but not during the waning days of 2006, that's for sure.

Addendum: You can use Windows Live Writer to post text-only posts to Blogger. I've used it on more than one occassion. It only chokes on posts with graphics -- you get one of those little "missing graphic" square boxes where your graphic should be. Ink is treated as as graphic, ergo, my misery.