Texty: The Simplest CMS

The principle here is that you put a script on your page which pulls the information from Texty’s database. You edit the content in that database through a simple online user interface, much like editing a blog post, for example. This is great for small organisations who may be prepared to pay a small amount to a web design firm for a basic site (or an off-the-shelf template) but do not have the skills to maintain well-written HTML themselves. So clubs, societies, and small (or even large) not-for-profits could all benefit from a simple system to help them manage the content of pages which change frequently, such as news or upcoming events listings. Some commercial firms might also welcome the convenience, although I suspect that many smaller businesses simply don’t feel the need to change their website content all that often. The other benefit may be that it is easy to allow multiple people to produce content without fear that they can cause problems for one another.

Why not get a blog instead?

For many people a blog is a handy way to post short pieces of news or information without having to write underlying code. However, the popular free offerings only give limited control over the appearance of the site from a selection of templates.

So a separate site without your own ‘branding’ may not be appropriate to give an integrated public web presence. There may also be a feeling that a blog will not be seen as the “official” face of an organisation, as some still treat them as purely personal spaces – not helped by the number of people who seem intent on telling the world every detail of their cat’s daily menu and habits.

I have not used Texty for my site, so I have yet to see how it handles the look and feel aspects to integrate it within a website. I would hope it simply generates code using standard tags (H1,2,3…, P, A, IMG, UL/LI etc) and relies on the site’s own stylesheets to provide formatting (or leave it to a browser’s default). Even using classes or IDs would be an acceptable middle-ground, except this would presume some changes to the site to use these specific styles.

Why have I not tried it yet?

I’m writing this post because I think Texty is an interesting proposition, but personally my company website is hand-written by me using a combination of Notepad (for quick changes to text or things like the CSS) and Expression Web (when I’m feeling lazy or want to do global find/replace for example).

I don’t use a graphical or “design” view in an editor because I have yet to find one which gives an accurate representation of how a page will render in any browser, yet alone any particular one. Instead I simply host the site on an internal server so I can quickly test how pages look in Firefox and Internet Explorer (version 8 most of the time, but I double check with 7 now and again). Most other standards-based browsers should do at least a similar job because I use CSS and XHTML 1.1 (which is pretty much the same as strict 1.0). There’s nothing which is too dependant on exact positioning, as long as things are in approximately the right places it’s more about the content. For me accessibility is key, so I test in various screen sizes (resolutions) to see that the important items are visible even on smaller screens, as well as getting the order and flow right so someone can use the site based on text alone or using screen reading software, for example.

Let me know if you have used Texty

So, if you have used Texty or a similar service, let me know how it went. Was it easy to get working with your site? How did you integrate the content to maintain an overall consistent look and feel for your pages? Do you use it for all your pages, or just the most frequently changed?

Windows Live Writer Beta 3 was recently announced and it works really well. That is to say, it “does what it says in the tin”. Writing well-formed blog posts is really simple, it even downloads styles directly from my WordPress blog and allows to me to do proper previews to see exactly what I will get before I publish a post, even when working offline.

There’s even more rich functionality and interoperability with third-party platforms than you might expect from a Microsoft product. For example, WordPress.com supports hierarchical categories. I find this especially useful as I show my categories as a drop-down list rather than take up loads of the sidebar with lots of choices. Windows Live Writer (WLW) provides me the ability to categorise posts, and to add new categories if I need them, including specifying a parent category so they fit into the multi-level hierarchy. Oh, and it does all this offline as well. This is great, and it’s the sort of attention to detail which I appreciate being in a product I use several times a week.

And now the Bad News: WLW does not support the new WordPress Tags by default

WordPress.com have announced a change to the way they use categories and tags. Windows Live Writer Beta 3 was released before this change and does not know what to do with them, so it does not create any, and removes any that already exist if you edit a previous post. However, there is a way to fix this with a registry change, but I found it caused some instability.

What is the point of Tags?

Basically lots of people would create categories to use just once, in the way that they might use tags or keywords on other platforms in order to provide good search engine terms and attract traffic. However, this has a couple of problems. Firstly because categories are universal throughout WordPress (if I happen to create a category with a name matching one that someone else used it shows a really low Category ID number, a uniquely named one would get a new, high number).

It also makes a real mess of people’s category lists as they end up really long and to some extent pointless – as a blog reader, I expect the idea of a category to mean a container which will have more than one post in. “Hey, they have a whole category of posts for Live Writer! Oh, just the one post” is always a disappointment. The category list can also give me an idea of the overall angle of the site – is this a web copywriter writing about a useful tool for editing blogs, or a developer who happens to use this tool and maybe writes extensions for it?

So, the new definitions on WordPress.com now line up with most other blogs – categories are permanent things you create to organise your posts into groups, tags are just transient things you use to describe what is in a particular post in such a way that people can search for them more easily, and over time they may form a sort of grouping by serendipity as you use the same tags over and over when writing about similar subjects.

Tag cloud widget for finding posts by tags

There is even a new widget to show a “Tag cloud” in the sidebar of some themes, as you will have seen on many other platforms before. This shows frequent tags in a larger, bolder format to indicate their repetition (on that particular blog) so one-offs appear much smaller and less obtrusively. There is also a limit of 45 tags shown at once, according to a thread in the support forums, which prevents it from getting too huge. I assume this means only the 45 most frequent tags will appear, not the first 45 used. When you hover over a tag name it shows in a tooltip how many posts are associated with that tag, which is useful.

Tag cloud issues

This “Tag cloud” widget does not work properly yet. Firstly, it seems to take an absolute age for it to update after publishing posts with new tags. I’ve been waiting over an hour now for a bunch of words to show up and they have not yet done so. This might be because of some system issues as loads of regular bloggers are probably updating loads of previous posts (as I am), but it remains to be seen whether this improves with time.

Secondly, the widget simply does not link properly to the related posts. The FAQ about the difference between tags and categories says this:

A post into the category ‘food’ and with the tag ‘rice’ will look like this:

http://faq.wordpress.com/category/food/

http://faq.wordpress.com/tag/rice/

Hovering over a link in the Tag cloud shows the URL correctly formed to use the tags such as http://veroblog.wordpress.com/tag/windows-live-writer/. However, when clicked this redirects to http://veroblog.wordpress.com/category/windows-live-writer/ which in this case does not exist.

What about Windows Live Writer and WordPress Tags?

Problem 1: There is nowhere in the GUI of WLW Beta 3 to add tags in.

Categories still work as expected, but there’s no way to actually add a tag in WLW as installed. Hopefully they will add this functionality by default to the live release. This is supposed to be the last Beta before the final code, unless this WordPress issue changes things and they decide a Beta 4 is needed to push this out.

Problem 2: WARNING! If you use WLW to edit an existing post which has tags, they are dropped when you re-publish

Let’s walk through this:

You write a new post in Windows Live Writer (or the web editing tool).
You then use the web interface to edit the post and add some tags.
You later edit it in WLW (which will download the post from your blog if you have edited it in the web interface since last touching it in WLW).
You make a change and republish.

Oops! Because you have no means to add tags, it now has none. It does not keep this metadata somewhere, untouched by your edit. It does not try to do a clever merge, it just replaces the post and all its metadata, categories etc wholesale. (Except it keeps the original posting date/time stamp). If you don’t make a change to WLW (see below) and you are adding tags in the web interface, expect to see thm disappear when you edit with WLW.

How to add a tags field to WLW to solve these problems

Actually, you can add a field for putting in tags (or keywords, as WLW calls them).

<edit:
Joe Cheng has published a tool to do this to save you from editing the registry directly. You can read about it and download from here.
Also, Joseph Scott has updated the manifest at WordPress.com to make it automatic so if you start WLW, close it again and restart you should get the new settings and the keyword field will be available to you without doing anything else.
Thanks to both guys for their contributions via the comments. The rest of the post remains for anyone that still wants to see it, although you should not need it given both options above. /edit>

You need to make a change to the registry, so make sure to close WLW, check that you have backups, permission from your parents, and you are not too drunk to do this safely. Don’t edit the registry if you are not sure what you are doing. This information is provided “as is”, I can’t help you if you break things by following this advice.

If you have a version before Beta 3, Windows Live Writer was a separate application, and the reg key you need will be here:

HKCU\Software\Windows Live Writer\Weblogs\{blog-id}\UserOptionOverrides

Beta 3 became part of the Windows Live Suite, so the path changes to:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer\Weblogs\{blog-id}\UserOptionOverrides

If you use WLW for editing multiple blogs, then go to each {blog-id} in turn and check the BlogName value for the one you want. Now you have the right one, under UserOptionOverrides you need to add a String “supportsKeywords” with a value of “yes”. Restart WLW.

To the right of the publish date at the bottom right hand corner is a double up-arrow. Click it and a box expands which gives you access to all the metadata for your post, and now the keywords tag is available for you to put a comma-separated list of tags into before you publish. This does solve the problems above, but I have found it makes WLW unstable in certain ways, such as trying to edit a draft which did not have tags associated with it, and even downloading a published post to make changes has been causing me some crashes in an otherwise very stable product. More testing required for me to pin down what combination causes a problem.

<edit2: I can now only reproduce the instability on one particular post (this one, as it happens), all others seem fine. /edit>

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This is supposedly to be the last of the Beta versions of WLW before a final one is released. There are a few changes over Beta 2, most notably where the program gets installed.

More information about switching dictionaries

If you already followed my post about changing the dictionary to a UK English version you may be interested in this article in which the author has done what I wish I had found time for – a follow up on Graham’s work to find those other language files and perhaps a clue as to the engine being used here.

I’ll do a follow up post about the UK dictionary switch once I have Beta 3 installed.

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As several people have pointed out, Windows Live Writer (WLW) Beta comes with an American English dictionary by default. This is frustrating as it means I end up adding lots of things to my custom dictionary which I should not really need to do. I have also commented that it would be nice if it could look for and use (and share) my custom dictionary from MS Office. Why do I keep having to add my surname and street (for example) to a dictionary for every application? Isn’t it about time someone started using an Open format for dictionaries (maybe XML based like everything else these days)?

How to swap the US dictionary for a British one

In this blog post Graham Chastney describes how to swap the ssceam.clx file for sscebr2.clx. Interestingly my install has ssceam2 – perhaps a version number based on the fact I am running Beta2?

Anyway, his instructions are simply to swap the *AM*.clx file for a downloaded *BR*.clx file in Program Files\Windows Live Writer\Dictionaries by copying in and renaming, and essentially this works. The .clx file contains all kinds of clever dictionary things such as valid word endings, and this fixes all the -ised, -ising problems and so on. My recommendation is to rename the files by appending .us (rather than .old) so that it is more obvious which is which if you do want to swap between them.

However, what Graham neglects to mention is that the associated .tlx file is a list of 1000+ words including lots of the roots like color / colour so you really need to swap this too if you want to fix all of the spelling “mistakes”. If you leave this alone, then both “color” and “colour” will be accepted as correct spellings. This may suit you or you may prefer (as I do) to show US spellings as incorrect in which case you need to swap the .tlx file as well.

Swapping the files out without renaming causes WLW to fail at startup, and there seems to be no way to have more than one dictionary used “live” nor to choose a language in the GUI. Maybe there is some undocumented reg hack to set which one to use, but there is nothing obvious as the only value under the Live Writer key is to indicate the install path.

Why is Live Writer written like a bad third-party application?

EDIT: OK, this was simply wrong. After a couple of comments below I went back and checked. It was my mistake, I had been chasing something down and had my virtualised filestore open and switched windows while I was swapping dictionaries around. I screwed up. The user dictionary is in the roaming part of the profile, which is a really great place for it to live and exactly where I would want it to be kept. The whole of this paragraph is hereby stricken from the record. I apologise to readers for confusion and to the developers for the accusations.

Bad Adam – back in my box!

Incidentally, I find it really odd that WLW acts like a legacy application on Vista and stores the custom user dictionary in a virtualised folder …What happened to “eating your own dog food”? Bad dog, Microsoft – back in your box.

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So, after a very quick download of the 3MB installation file and a simple, no frills installation, I was ready to go. Compare this with the vast and unnecessary 21MB of Adobe’s Acrobat reader – and don’t get me started on the fact that they force me to first download a download manager before I can finally download the actual setup file, when I could have just used my several highly competent browser plugins to get the install files so much quicker. Foxit also comes as an MSI – so much easier than Adobe’s EXE file when it comes to deployment using standard tools such as Group Policy Software Installation (GPSI) or scripts. These download sizes are reflected in the relative amounts of memory consumed by these two products when opening files to view.

Why do I care about my PDF file reader so much? Well, I actually use PDFs fairly extensively for storing “read-only” copies of my own documents, which I then want to access, print, share or publish as easily as possible.

Creating all these PDFs is easy

For creating PDF files I have been using FreePDF XP for ages. This is a free tool which enables you to output PDFs from almost any application by printing to the virtual printer installed by the software (which sits on top of GhostScript). This has been really successful for me on both XP and Vista operating systems. Although the original is written in German, translations exist for a great many languages including English, and you can request the files required to translate into further local languages as well if you had a need for something not already covered.

I’ve also recently been using the feature in Office 2007 to save as PDF. This is a free additional download from MS – this is due to them having to take the functionality out of the core product in the face of anti-competitive practices lawsuits in the EU and elsewhere. I have found the quality of the output using this to be less than great, especially for images. I don’t really want to send people a document where my company logo looks like it has measles. The alternative XPS format may be a good alternative, but right now I can’t rely on recipients having the capability to read these without some effort on their part to download and install the viewer.

Having said this, I have had a few gripes with PowerPoint 2007. FreePDF shows up pretty average square bullets as weird symbols from some other font. On the other hand, PowerPoint itself can’t reproduce a “glow” outline nor the soft edges on my pictures when exporting to PDF (it does a fuzzy grey outline instead of a clean fade-to-white). The pictures themselves are OK, so what’s so damned hard for Microsoft to work out about what is basically a gradient fill? I would rather it be omitted and leave a hard edge than be included and show up grey and dirty-looking.

Why do I use PDF files instead of the original document?

The main reason for me using these type of “portable document” formats in the first place is so that I can send or publish documents with a pretty high expectation that what the reader gets is what I intended, without them calling me to ask why it won’t open. I also use PDF for any “final version” documents which I want to keep so I can do less self-checking to make sure I have the latest version – I only keep one PDF of a document, even if I have several original Word docs or whatever.

A third use I have for them is for re-using parts of documents I have already written. It is trivial with FreePDF to print pages “1-3,7,18,29-” of a Word document out to a PDF file, rather than copying and pasting these equivalent sections out to a new document, making sure the formatting is OK etc. Using PowerPoint I usually set up a custom show which only includes the slides to print, rather than the ones to display. In a couple of clicks I can ‘save’ this cut-down version as a PDF ready to publish or send to people. My training courses often have appendices of “quick reference” information, such as shortcut keys for an application. I re-use this content with a small amount of reformatting and produce laminated handouts for course attendees. These are often A5 and double sided rather than the original two pages of A4 – the whole point is that they can be kept around on the desk as a handy reference sheet, so they should not be too big.

Surely a PDF just prints exactly as saved – WYSIWYG, right?

What I don’t want to spend time on is changing all the font sizes and paragraph layout to convert everything to the smaller scale. Instead, I generate A4-formatted PDF files and then print two pages to a sheet. Using Adobe’s Acrobat reader, I can do this fairly easily, but the problem is that it then adds a margin around the sheet in addition to the margin which already exists within the pages. This means I have to do an extra formatting step to minimise the margin in the original before making the PDF to work around the extra margin issue. With Foxit reader, it does no such thing, and is quite happy to reduce print two A4 pages on one sheet of A4 without adding anything extra at the edges, so I can just get on with printing and laminating them ready to hand out.

Acrobat reader has now been uninstalled from my system. Now I have just two tasks to do – change the link on my website which points to the Adobe reader download to enlighten my visitors to the alternative of Foxit, and learn more about doing clever things with XML and style templates so I can do no extra formatting of content, just re-use it in a different format with zero effort.

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Later I may give it a bit more corporate gloss and “pictures of people in smart suits drinking cappuccinos in a meeting, and someone good looking with a headset on smiling at the camera” (to quote a friend who kindly gave me their thoughts on what it was missing).

As regular readers will know, clear presentation of information is a hot topic of mine, particularly when I am delivering software training. As I am a MOS: Master I do a lot of Microsoft Office courses, and try to focus not just on the features of the applications but also advise on good practices. This might include clear layout of a Word document, suitable formatting of an Excel chart, or the whole process of designing a professional presentation to deliver your message clearly and avoid “death by PowerPoint”.

This area of interest means I read a lot of articles about presentation of information in all sorts of media and genres – people like Edward Tufte and Jakob Nielsen being two prime examples, but Hichert and Partner and Presentation Zen bring me back many times to read their latest thoughts. (Incidentally, it is this kind of “extra-curricular” reading that makes me a self-confessed geek. Normal people read Harry Potter, I am told.)

I was pleased, therefore, to stumble across a web design agency that seemed to give some thought to issues of usability, designing a site so people can find it (mainly through SEO) but also to find the right information within it. Not only that, but the Escape design and web agency are happy to publish articles telling how to do some of this stuff for yourself, and have a useful free web page analysis tool.

This produces reports of the header structure of the page, the keywords and their actual frequency in the content, and the words in the content which perhaps ought to be in the keywords. I am sure there are many similar tools out there that do such things, this one just seemed to be trivially easy to use, and gave me some useful information to make my pages better.

Part of the trick of course is not just using this blindly, but getting hard facts to highlight deficiencies. For example, it might make me realise that I had a word in the keywords which was not used on that page. At face value, this might mean I should remove that misleading keyword. On the other hand it could be that I was right when I chose the keywords but now need to edit the body copy to actually include a topic I missed out the first time round.

This is a continual improvement process, and needs revisiting periodically to get the best results. I am happy that despite being a small business, Meteor IT is in the top ten Google hits for several key search phrases, and first result for one in particular that is important to me. I know that metadata keywords do not play such a great part as they used to in search engine results pages (SERPs) as they once did, but they are a useful route to focussing your mind on what you are trying to achieve with a given page.

So, I found a plain speaking site, delivering the information I wanted, in a way I could access and benefit from. Their own website is therefore a pretty good example of the sort of thing I would want an agency to come up with. Unfortunately for them they did not get any business from me this time, but their tool was good enough to prompt me to write this and tell others about it, so it will probably score some success down the line.

I do read a lot of different websites on a daily basis and often stumble across things I would blog about, but often put this off until I can find a quiet few minutes to comment and expand upon something, rather than write simply “Look at this…”. All too often those quiet moments come when I am out of range of an internet connection so the thought never gets posted.

Windows Live Writer (now in Beta2) now makes this a whole lot easier by allowing me to compose, edit and publish through a single friendly tool, offline or online.

The RSS feeds in Outlook 2007 are an absolute bonus as they mean that I can just let them gather articles in the background and I can then very quickly browse through the interesting stuff when offline – bus or train journeys are a great time to catch up when I can’t necessarily focus on ‘real’ work.

So the flip side of this offline reading should be offline writing, which is where Windows Live Writer comes in (which I am using to write this post).

I can write a blog post, including links and “rich media” (aka “pretty pictures” to those of us without an A level in Marketing speak) entirely offline. More importantly, I get spell-checking on the fly (with squiggly underlining like MS Word) and I see the result as I go along in the style of my finished site, if I choose to. The WordPress built-in editor does not provide this; I have to preview to realise that I never closed that blockquote, for example.

Currently, Live Writer works with these blog types (and more in future as people take advantage of the APIs):

• Windows Live Spaces
• Sharepoint
• WordPress
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• TypePad
• Moveable Type
• Community Server

There are a few oddities:

• the install asked me to set my IE homepage to MSN Home which I chose not to do, despite the fact I use IE for only 2% of my browsing so it would not often bug me, but I resent being pushed at a site which has nothing to do with the task at hand.
• Spell-checking is only US English. I realise this is only Beta but I would have hoped for a regional version, or maybe it could have checked for the presence of MS Office and used the dictionaries I have there, including my customisations.
• Beta 2 claims to be Beta version 1.0, albeit with a more detailed build number behind that.

So, download Windows Live Writer Beta 2 and start using it to update your own blogs (or create one on MS LiveSpaces if you don’t already have one).