Blogware’s New Rich Text Editor, Part 1

If you’ve used Blogware over the past week or so, you might have

noticed a couple of changes to the page in which you enter text for

articles, photo descriptions and reviews.

The original editor worked the way most web-based blog editors do;

you’d enter your article, complete with HTML formatting. If you wanted

a an entry that looked like this…

Here’s some bold text, and here’s some italicized text.

And while we’re at it, here’s a picture of one handsome fella:

…you’d have to type in something that looked like this:

Here's some <strong>bold</strong> text,
and here's some <em>italicized</em> text.

<img 
src="http://joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2003/12/joey.jpg">

If you wanted to get a better idea of what your entry looked like, you’d click the Preview

button to see your formatting in action. If you didn’t like what you

saw, you’d go back to the edit page, type in some more HTML, go back to

the preview, and so on. This back-and-forth is time-consuming, annoying

and feels rather like being in stone age, especially if you’re used to

using a modern word processor. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make

blog entries is a more WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) way?

Blogware lets you do that now. Here’s a screen shot of the new rich

text editor as seen under Internet Explorer 6 and Windows XP:

Just so Mac users don’t feel left out (hey, I’m one too), here’s the same thing as seen using Mozilla and Mac OS X (“Panther”):

Just in case you’re feeling homesick for HTML source or need to use

some HTML formatting that isn’t covered by the controls offered, a

simple click of a button will take you from Display mode to Source mode:

For those of you using Windows, the rich text edior is available under Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla 1.5.

Mac users who want to use the rich text editor should use Mozilla

1.5. It won’t work under Safari or Internet Explorer right now, but

we’re working on that.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll walk through the features of the

rich text editor and also show some tips and tricks. I’ll also be

updating the Blogware User Manual to cover the new rich text editor.

In the meantime, if you’re a Blogware user, give the new rich text editor a try!

(This entry also appears in the Blogware blog.)