This is a sample PNG of the interface of the Microsoft Live Writer interface, tested for image insertion and uploading through a ghastly hack.
What a pain!
When I first started blogging, I used Blogger at my brother's recommendation, for several reasons:
- It was free.
- It was somewhat easy (for me).
- It was highly customizable.
The remnants of that blog are still visible at http://stampy.uvm.edu/robrohr, the original robrohr.org. I would create my ray HTML templates with custom tags inserted into the bitstream where all of the bloggy goodness was to appear. I had control of styles and layout; Blogger hosted the database of posts and would generate new pages from my templates whenever I added a new post, and those would be pushed back to my web server via FTP, at which point my bloggy goodness was available to nauseate global internet audiences.
Sometime around 2002, the University at which I worked decided (rightly) that unencrypted userid/pwd traffic across the campus boundary wouldn't be allowed, and the era of FTP came to a sudden close. At that point, I decided to look into installing blog hosting software on my server directly, avoiding the transfer of pages and account information outside the Uni. Thus begat .Text which begat Community Server 1.0, which begat Community Server 1.1, which begat Community Server 2.0, which begat Community Server 2.1 (framework 1.1 then 2.0). And the framework loaded and the service account had permissions and it was good.
Since then, I have tried various tools to create blog posts remotely, looking for anything that would make post creation easier than the builtin web editing pages. Many had promise until it came to handling inline images in the blog posts at which point they all gracefully/gracelessly choked.
Up until today, my process for mashing images into posts involved pushing images to the web server using Foldershare, then inserting raw HTML <img /> tags in my post source view. It worked but it's far from WYSIWYG, and not the most natural editing environment.
My current setup which I am testing with limited success is as follows:
- Set up FTP server on client machine.
- Block all FTP access to all but the loopback address (localhost :: 127.0.0.1)
- Link FTP destination folder on client to web visible folder on the web server via Foldershare.
By this method, I can use FTP to publish images to the client machine, images which get synchronized to the appropriate folder on the web server. FTP auth traffic never goes over the wire (loopback - Whee!). Images get pushed to the web server via encrypted synchronization channel (Foldershare). No script kiddies will have any success pounding away at my FTP. Not pretty, but I can finally use a pretty good tool to generate posts with rich image handling.
Squee!