phil ringnalda

Warning: this post is brought to you by the number 0.9 and the letter beta – don’t try this in your own home unless you’re willing to risk a bit of confusion and messed up posts!

Back in its day, Blogger’s remote editing feature was a cool tool: add ?blogEdit to your blog url while you were signed in, and you would get [edit] links after any posts you were authorized to edit, which would pop up the post in a new window, ready to edit. Then it went downhill, and now most people who use it just hide the links as periods the color of the background, hoping that their readers won’t notice (they can’t edit, but having a link that pops up a “sign in” page isn’t ideal).

Thanks to the magic of the Blogger API, now there’s a new way to do remote editing: the Adminimizer Toolbar installs as an IE6 toolbar, and once you add a couple of tags to your template, and an XML file on your site, when you want to edit a post you just click the toolbar icon to turn every post on the page into an editable box. Make your changes, using the formatting buttons on the toolbar, and click the “save” icon to send your edited posts through the API.

The beta part: this is the third or fourth time I’ve tried to edit this post into its final form. I think my mistake was trying to save my username and password in the toolbar: once I did that, things went bad until I closed and reopened the browser (at which point it was no longer saved). Also, when the page loads, I see it load, pause, reload quickly, and then finish loading. Click to edit too quick, and you are told that you aren’t authorized to edit the page, and you have to reload and give it a bit more time to load. Hazards of a slow dialup connection, I suppose. Worse yet: I see that it is ruining html character entities, clobbering my em dashes and Tantek’s name, and that it is merrily adding a new break tag in some places on every edit. Sigh. It really doesn’t seem to like Blogger’s “convert line breaks” in the least.

I still have to figure out exactly how to go from the wysiwyg view to the source view and back: just like in my Radio trial, I have a hard time remembering that I’m not allowed to just type HTML into the editor whenever I want. But, beta, learning curve, who cares: it’s a shiny new toy!