've been writing and posting articles on various sites for some time and, for me at least, the process has always been a painful one. For years I'd write the articles in Word, paste the completed document into Visual Studio, clean up the resulting HTML and formatting by switching back and forth between the source and the display panels, and finally upload the completed HTML to my site's database. Not exactly a roadblock, but this was certainly a speed bump in the creative process.
Beginning with Word 2007, Microsoft introduced a feature that removes the middle man and significantly streamlines the process of publishing articles online: Word now talks directly to blogging systems, including Subtext (the blogging framework upon which this site is based)!
I'm not the first to post on Word's new blogging features. In fact, I'm a bit late to the game; however, much of the research I turned up on Word 2007's blogging functionality didn't actually apply to what I was trying to do and a few sites alluded to steps that needed to be taken but didn't provide much in the way of details. So this post documents my own personal experiences on configuring Word to work with Subtext. On the whole, I thought it was relatively easy and I find blogging with Word 2007 a positive change, the advantages of which outweigh the drawbacks. Your mileage may vary.
Basic Word Configuration
Configuring Word2007 for blogging with Subtext is a snap and if you've never done it before, you'll get prompted to configure just by opening a new, blank blog entry. That is:
At this point, Word detects that you have no blogging accounts setup and prompts you to create a new one. Word comes preconfigured with a slew of blog providers, but at the time of this writing, Subtext is not one of them. That's okay though; as I said before, configuring Word is really easy. So from the Blog dropdown, just choose "other" and click the Next button:
Beyond the username password (which you presumably know if you 
actually blog to your site), there are only two settings to configure:
- The API dropdown - For Subtext, this should always be set to MetaWebLog.
-
The Blog Post URL textbox – This is a bit less obvious, but it is the full URL of your Subtext site plus:
/services/metablogapi.aspx
That is, if your Subtext installation rests at www.mblog.com, then your Blog Post URL would be:
http://www.mblog.com/services/metablogapi.aspx
Those running short on faith (I'll pray for you, my brothers) might try to locate this file in their site's directory structure, just for reassurance that they have the URL correct. This will likely convince them that they managed to get their installation of Subtext fouled up when they find that this file does not actually exist. Don't be bothered by this. Subtext leverages a form of URL rewriting to make this address work; so enter this magic URL along with your username and password, secure in the knowledge that Word will immediately award you with a success or an error message as soon as you press the OK button.
Special Notes on Picture Options
The picture options button pulls up yet another dialog:
The default setting of "My blog provider" is the correct setting for SubText, but it doesn't hurt to open it up and look at the setting.
At this point I should mention that, as of the 1.9.5 release, SubText and Word 2007 do not exchange images. That is, pictures embedded in your post in Word, will not appear in your post when it's been published. This can be made to happen, and it's quite easy, really. I'll cover this in my next post.