I find that I have developed a method of sorts for posting.

1. Think, hey I should blog about this
2. Create a post in an editor
   1. Nvu
   2. docs.google.com
   3. ecto (although I have line break issues that I can't seem to workout)
   4. vi
3. Re-read it to make sure I don't sound like a raving lunatic (unless that is the goal)
4. Spell check (Firefox 2.0RC3 inline spell check is my favorite new capability)
5. Publish Post
   1. u*blog for treo
   • works reasonably well
   • no HTML, I copy <br/> and paste it as needed to achieve readable flow
   1. Found a problem with docs.google.com
      • It appears to have issues with nested lists
      • unless you change back to numbers before you outdent
        
   2. docs.google.com
      • works reasonably well, has issues with time offset
      • writes fairly clean HTML, but posts it without line breaks
      • messing around with entry from multiple locations may break update(re-publish) capability
      • subsequent updates cause the offset problem again
   3. ecto
      • great publishing and management tool
      • has problems with time offset (or hard to determine setting that works correctly)
        
      • Not so hot on getting output to look as expected
        • Losing line breaks unexpectedly
        • RTF convert linebreaks does not appear to work as expected
   4.  blogs.sun.com (roller)
      
      • Not fond of any of the built in editors
      • New inline editor is coming, (I followed a link and looked at it, not bad, but now can't find the link)
      • Time on post always as expected :)
      • With Firefox 2.0RC3 inline spellcheck fixes one of my biggest gripes
6. Read post online to try and make sure I didn't miss anything stupid
7. Update numerous times to bother people using RSS readers which show updates
8. Wonder if anyone cares
9. Manically bounce on the CMD-R to see if my page hit counter is increasing
10. Check Google Analytics Frequently (even though updates are only once a day)
11. Occasionally wonder how time of posting affects readership
    • Do you get more readers if you post right about break, lunch, after dinner time?
    • If you do time your posts does it help more with readers of the b.s.c homepage?
    • Do RSS readers increase your page views?
    • Should this post be held until morning so as not to be buried?
    • Maybe posted now and forward dated
    • Running out of things to put in the list
      
12. Wonder how many people have read this far and think you are crazy

Publishing test from docs.google.com

Paul posted not too long ago about publishing to blogs.sun.com from docs.google.com.

I am giving it a shot, I have been using ecto for posting and I like it a lot.

However I am less pleased with it's HTML editing, or RTF to HTML as rendered by default
on b.s.c.

So at the moment I am editing HTML in Nvu, which is working well, however I am trying
docs.google.com for HTML editing to see how I like it instead.

Nvu does a great job at HTML editing, but it is more feature rich that I feel that I need
in general for blog posts.  I also find that I am online the majority of the time while I am
composing blog entries.

Again it seems that almost everything goes back to the current capacity of my laptop, but
if I can do most(all) of this in a browser interface that I don't hate, why not.

Now to see how timing is working, Paul commented that there were issues with time offsets.

I am having similar problems using Ecto, I thought I had it mostly worked out but instead
every post I publish is way off in time. At some point I will revisit that, but for now I am
logging in and modifying the time for every post.

Well, here goes.


Edit:
well, the post was 6 hours in the future
Now to see if I can publish an update, of if this will go in as a separate post.


Edit 2: Good news and bad news
Good News: "re-publish" acts as an update, not a new post
Bad News: It resets the publish time to now+6 hours

(now to publish again and manually edit the time (again))


Impressions:
It works AND the HTML is not an ugly mess
If it comes down to it I can copy and paste HTML as I was before
I may continue to use docs.google.com to write entries, particularly since etco fetches them after they are posted.

Edit 3: Lame
One thing I just noticed is that the posted HTML (as opposed to the editor displayed HTML)
is posted as all one line. It doesn't hurt the rendering at all, but does make it significantly
harder to read the raw HTML once it is posted.

Ecto downloads the HTML in the same fashion (no linebreaks) which indicates to me that it is
not a local (blogs.sun.com editor) rendering problem.


Also, I can't figure out how to apply tags from inside the docs.google.com editor,
only from the list of documents (and I am not sure how it will work in any case).

Oops:
Broke something, I can't publish updates anymore, the blogs.sun.com url specific
to this entry no longer appears to be valid (some edit on one side or the other has
probably caused it to change) (now updating from ecto)

Edit 'The Last':
The problem that I have with ecto and line breaks persists, the valid looking HTML
is stripping the line breaks. Trying to publish RTF both with local 'convert line breaks' enabled
and disabled results in a nice solid block of text. Back to Taking well formatted HTML
(from Nvu or docs.google.com) and pasting into ecto. Yet another thing to spend time on later
to try and figure out.

Strangely each update I sent with ecto bumped the publish time forward by one hour,
not sure what that is about either.

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