After some time of interruption I start to blog again.
To mark this event I decided to assign a new domain name for my blog address, http://blog.hosimauthuc.net, as you have seen.
I came across Windows Live Writer (WLW) while playing with BlogSvc, an open source ASP.NET 3.5 blog engine built with ASP.NET MVC framework. I found Windows Live Writer quite useful as a blog authoring tool, especially in the following points:
- It allows me to author my blog posts offline. When I get online, just one mouse click will bring the post to my blog.
- It uses my blog theme inside its IDE. I can almost write and preview my posts as the same time.
- It has plug-ins to support formatting code examples.
The last point is quite important for technical bloggers like me. Leo Vildosola’s plug-in is a popular one (downloadable from here). Here below is a code snippet example created with Leo’s tool:
1: public ActionResult Search()
2: {3: string query = Request.Form["keywords"];
4: char[] par = { ' ' };
5: string[] keywords = query.Split(par);
6: ResourceStorage rs = SearchService.SearchByKeywords(keywords); 7: rs.Name = query; 8: 9: return View("Search", new SearchResults(rs));
10: }Some kind souls in the above places have recommended the following two tips to get a clean display:
- Remove max-height attribute from the generated source to get rid of the vertical scroll bar.
- Change WLW’s blog settings to generate HTML markup (instead of XHTML as the default one) to avoid broken style when writing blogs for Google’s Blogger.
I discovered that sometimes WLW's generated markups don't fit my expectation on Blogger (this may happen for Blogger only). Under those circumstances I log on to Blogger and perform final layout clean-up there.
