I had a realization today that I must be posting to my blog the hard way. I mean, each post I make to my blog included the process of copying and pasting my article from OneNote into the Blogger web interface. I mean, I am using Office 2007; they have built in tools for publishing articles to blogs, why am I not using them?

Well, tonight I made my first attempt to try them out. My first attempt was the “A little distracted” post and this is the second attempt. I ran into a few issues and annoyances in the process, some due to it being the first try, others due to ether shortcomings of the feature or my lack of understanding. Overall, the process is quite simple and all future posts will be done via Office 2007.

I usually draft out my post using OneNote. I just find it convenient. It is always available in my system try, pops up quickly and allows quite a bit of flexibility when making that initial draft. From there I just copy and paste it to the blogger web UI to make the final post. This time however I tried to use the File -> Send to -> Blog option. Nothing happened … I must be doing something wrong. I did a quick search in the OneNote online help for “send to blog”. Nothing … ok, then a trusty Google search will lead the charge. I found a post on Chris Pratley’s OneNote Blog titled Blogging with OneNote 2007 via Word 2007, sounds like a winner.

It describes how when you click the “blog” option in the Send To menu it will send your OneNote page to Word and from there you can publish it to your blog. It sounds simple enough, so I check the “Blog” menu item again and nothing… Maybe you need to have Word open for it to work. Nothing … Well this is taking entirely too much time, let us try a different approach. There is also a “Microsoft Office Word” option in the “Send To” Menu. That worked! It opened Word and pasted the article into a new document. Great! Now what?

Well with a quick browse through the Word Menu I came across a menu named “Publish”, sounds promising. Well what do you know, there is a “Blog” option, I hope this one works. Once I clicked the option it prompted me to select my blogging site, well we are making progress now! Well, what do you know; Blogger is an option in the list of supported blogging sites. I entered in my username and password and made a successful connection. Whoa! All right, now let us post the article. As soon as I connected to the blog site, I had new options presented to me by Word. I could publish my article, publish it as a draft, manage my blog connection and even open posts I already posted. Wow, this is great. Now for the big moment, I click “Publish” … Success! Very cool.

Once completed, I noticed a few things I wanted to change in the post. I updated the article in Word and attempted to publish it again. Error. Hmmmm, maybe I did something wrong. I looked for an update option, no go. Tried the publish option a few more times hoping that repeating the same steps over and over again would produce a different result. Nope, and I have just proven that I am insane.

Oh well, I copied the updated contents of the article in Word and updated the post using the Blogger UI. I am going to keep using these tools and see if these issues are due to my misunderstanding of the tool or a lacking in the feature. Either way, it has made publishing articles simpler.