Well I have been otherwise engaged for the past few months, and so I haven't had anything remotely useful to blog about, but I have made the plunge and installed Office 2007 which includes a couple of useful new features related to blogs.
In Word 2007, when you choose to create a new document, it gives you the option of creating a new Blog post.
The first time you do this it requests that you enter the details of your blog provider, it has a dropdown list of popular provider's and as I use Blogspot I figured I was out of luck. So I clicked on the link that my blog provider isn't listed, I was taken to this page, which has a useful description of how to do all this stuff in word. Well it helpfully pointed out that all I needed was the API my provider uses and the Posting URL. This was this point when I remembered that Blogspot and blogger are essentially the same thing, well it had been a while since I last used it!
From here I went back to word and inputted my account details and it successfully connected and retrieved the list of blogs under my account, I selected the right one and away I go. It does remain to be seen how the formatting works, but I won't know that until I have submitted it!
The other feature I have found that helps me review the blogs I like to visit is the built in RSS support in Outlook, whilst there is support for RSS feeds in IE7 it makes better sense to me to have Outlook tell me when a blog has new posts rather than looking in IE. Adding RSS feeds is as easy as right clicking on the RSS feeds folder and selecting add a new feed, enter the feed URL, then optionally select advanced settings to change the location of the feed content (i.e. a PST), whether you want to download enclosures to the feed and if you want to download the article as an html file.
You can also change the frequency with which Outlook automatically checks for new content by way of Send/receive groups.
