Brian Hartsock's Blog

I have convinced another employee of mine to start a blog. Check out Robert Beheiter’s blog, first few posts on F#. Looking forward to future posts.

I downloaded Windows Live Writer today and am using it to publish this post.

Why Live Writer and not the Wordpress interface?  No real reason.  The nice thing about live writer is I get the benefits of using a desktop app instead of a web app.  It is faster, can work offline, and HTML editing is a bit easier (yes, I am a web developer but it is nice to work a layer above HTML sometimes). 

Some of the really cool things are it is pulling almost all my data from Wordpress.  All my categories, tags, settings are here, which is nice. 

My only question is how is uploading this picture going to work?  If you are reading this, you already know whether it worked or not, unfortunately, I have no clue what is going to happen.

“A picture is worth 1000 words”

Most blogs that I read integrate media, specifically pictures, into their posts. A video can be avoided. Text can be skimmed. But pictures can’t be overlooked. Good pictures draw you into an article, or website, and add to the story the author is trying to tell you.

Last week, I posted a setup guide for NHaml with nearly 25 screen shots. Surprisingly, I was able to grab all the screenshots, cropped and everything, in about 15 minutes. Using the old school method of Print-Screen + Paint would have taken at least twice as long, and looked half as good.

Paying money for a screenshot utility seems ridiculous, but after playing around with it for a few days, I had to buy Snagit. I only used about 1% of its features, and that 1% is good enough to warrant spending the money. If you want to create media rich blog posts, I would highly recommend it. Even though the example is a little ridiculous, it shows how effortless creating great looking graphics with Snagit.