Foul Writer’s World

Having already covered how to link Contribute to a WordPress blog. I will now cover some of the pros and cons of using the application to create blog posts.

Pros

• Easy to use WYSIWYG interface
• Easy to add images and Flash elements to your blogs without needing to worry about uploading them first
• Easy to use delayed publishing feature
• Applying formatting is more precise that web interface
• A comprehensive spell-checker than the web interface
• Able to easily add tables to a blog post

Cons

• Contribute is not the most reliable application created (as a friend once said “Contribute is either the worst application to have ever been created, or the best application to have never gone through quality assurance testing”)
• Use of bullets and lists is not as precise as it should be
• Tags are included at the top of the blog post automatically
• It doesn’t have a proper auto-save capability
• Needs to be installed on your local machine

My next entry will include some basic screen shots and instructions about how to use Contribute to to create blog posts.

First of all, what is Contribute? Well at Adobe.com they put it like this:

…[Contribute] enables content authors to quickly and easily update existing websites and blogs while maintaining site integrity — with no technical expertise required. Thanks to a true WYSIWYG authoring environment, content authors and contributors can edit or update any website or blog without having to learn HTML.

I have been using Contribute since version 1.0. I used to recommend the application to friends and family that i built websites for, because it allowed me to create a simple template for them. This template when used in conjunction with Contribute made adding content to their websites easy, no need to learn HTML and no need to worry about FTPing.

I have found Contribute to be an easy to use application, albeit with plenty of bugs. Once Adobe got hold of Contribute from Macromedia I thought that would be the end of the application. But to my surprise Adobe announced Version 4. At the time I was using version 3.1 to create Knowledge Base articles. But thankfully due to some compatibility issues we upgraded to Contribute 4.1 (aka. Contribute CS3).

Version 4.1 saw the bigest addition to the software since version 2. The inclusion of blog posting. I will cover how to link Contribute to your WordPress blog and what features are available.

Creating a connection to your WordPress blog

This section covers how to create a connection to your WordPress blog. To create a connection:

1. Start Contribute.
2. Select Edit > My Connections (Windows) or Contribute > My Connections (Macintosh).

The My Connections dialog box appears. The options in this dialog box let you create and manage your Contribute connections.

3. Click Create.

The Connection Wizard (Windows) or Connection Assistant (Macintosh) appears. This wizard or assistant guides you through setting up a new website connection.

4. Click Next.
5. Select Blogs from the What do you want to connect to drop-down menu.
6. Select your blog’s host from the Who hosts your blog pop-up menu.

If you use WordPress of Blogger select the appropriate host from the drop-down list. If you host your own WordPress blog select Other Blog Servers



7. If you select Other Blog Server, enter the URL of your blog website in the What is the URL of your blog? text box
8. Click Next
9. Enter your blog user name and password
10. Enter the URL for the the Access Point of your blo

The access point for a WordPress blog is typically in the root folder of the blog



11. Click Done (Windows) or Finish (Macintosh) to complete the connection

Now that you’ve made your connection you can start to create blog posts in an easy to use WYSIWYG application. I will put up further posts about using Contribute and some of the pitfalls I have found.