tin_the_fatty weblog

A few days ago I setup a Movable Type weblog (piggybacking on mine) for James (a good friend whom I met a few years ago thru NPC) to play with. James is a very good writer, and he seems to enjoy writing to his blog as much as I enjoy reading it, so I am well pleased.

In response to his complaint about the relatively poor usability of Movable Type, I would say that, in exchange for the flexibility of the web interface (the web application is accessible from any computer running a web browser and connected to the network) one sacrifices some usability and features. You simply won’t get reasonable WYSIWYG text editing, and context sensitive forms don’t work very well in a browser. You also won’t get Microsoft Word-like type-as-you-go spellchecking, except on Mac OS X where this is a system-wide feature available to all applications which support it.

The best thing to do if one is writing anything over a few sentences long is to do it in a text editor or a word processor, and then cut and paste the text into the textarea box. You get all the nifty features of the text editor, such as auto-save, spellcheck, language highlight (good for writing HTML) and keyboard macros.

Try add a new blog entry in Movable Type, enter some random words in the textarea, and do a save. The saved version does not contain what you have just entered. That’s right, it is not possible to save the status of the web browser. If you lose your power or the machine crashes or god forbidden the browser hangs, you will lose all your work. If you do it in a text editor, you can save your work half way through and resume later on. Most modern text editors have auto-save, thereby minimizing the loss of data in the event of a mishap.

FWIW, there are native applications which allow users to read, write and post to weblogs, such as Newz Crawler for Windows, or NetNewsWire for Mac OS X. I prefer my text editors, and cut-and-pasting to textarea is no big deal to me, so I never adopted any of them for writing.