Since I started this blog a few years ago, I’ve gone through a few phases where I took some time to try to find a blog editor that fit my needs. My needs are pretty simple – all I really want is an editor where it’s easy to do any text formatting I want. I don’t usually do crazy formatting, but somehow, I’m convinced that I need it. Doing something like this shouldn’t take too much effort. Luckily, just about every editor does this. The one I’m using now makes it extremely simple.

The main reason I look for an editor is that I want the ability to easily work off-line. Community server (the sw running this site) has a web based editor, and you can’t really use a web based editor if you’re not connected to the internet. At any given time, I have 3-10 blog articles started, but just finish one up and post when I have time. Up until a few weeks ago, I would just write all the articles in Word and paste them into the web based editor when I wanted to post them. I abhor inefficiency, so although it hurt me to do this, it worked.

The two biggest problems I ran into trying to use any of the popular editors were getting them to work with this site (I usually could get this to work eventually), and the ability to post both through the corporate firewall (I couldn’t get any editors to do this consistently).

Just a few weeks ago, I discovered that the Word 12 beta has blog posting built in. I’m not usually one of those employees who rah-rahs about the ms software, but the blog editor is perfect (well, it has a few bugs, but the functionality is exactly what I want). The interface is simple (can you believe it – a simple interface from Microsoft), and the posting works without a hitch (almost – but I’m sure they’ll fix the bug).