Sun's StarOffice WebLog Publisher

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying out the Sun Weblog Publisher, an add-in for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org that enables you to publish web blog entries straight from within Writer.

Overall I'm very impressed - write your entry in Writer, adding links, formatting etc as you would with any document, and then click Send to blog and off your post goes to your chosen blog.

What I Like:

• Blogging API support - the WordPress, Blogger, and generic APIs are supported, so most of the blogging interfaces in other applications are supported.
• Supports multiple blogs - you can configure multiple blogs and then post the document to any of the blogs that you have configured.
• You can post spelling/grammar checked content - because it's Writer, your posts will be spellchecked and validated before you post.
• Formatting is automatically converted - if you are used to formatting elements in bold in your blog posts by hard-coding HTML, or even by using the built-in interface within your blogging environment, the Writer interface is far more convenient.

What I don't Like:

• You can't select multiple categories in a post - the system automatically downloads the categories from the blog host, but you can only select one of them. For WordPress, where most of my blogs are hosted, I prefer to select multiple categories depending on the post content.
• I found a bug - if you do include HTML in your blog post (just out of habit), then the blog post content becomes empty. Sun have promised me they are working on either a fix, or at least a warning to advise that this should happen. Of course, the idea is you format links like links in any Writer document, but after years of doing it by hand, it's easy to forget.
• No confirmation - once you click Send to blog the dialog just disappears and you have no idea whether the post was successful or failed. You can opt to be taken to the post as soon as the post has completed, but if you deselect this option you get nothing. Just a quick alert that the sequence had succeeded would be useful.

Of course, the benefits may not tempt the majority of people who prefer to use the direct interface on the web to their chosen blog. But I don't think that this is where the Weblog publisher will be most useful.

I think it will be best used by the managers, secretaries and other people who use Writer all day, but perhaps aren't used to using a blog. For them, writing in Writer is natural, blogging is confusing, and a quick way to send their thoughts to their blog is required. For them, the WebLog Publisher should help to encourage blogging by those influential people.