How To Jazz Up Your Blogging- Free and Easy!

 How To Jazz Up Your Blogging- Free and Easy!  

Do you want to add color to your text in your posts?

Do you want to change the font size?

Do you want to add some highlights to grab more attention to your blog?

Here is a list of online editors that you can type in WYSIWYG- and then with one click have it all turned into html for you without you having to know any html code.  I have used all of these editors.

This is a review of the pros and cons of each of these online editors. This way you can choose which one or more that you want to use in your blogging.

When someone asks me which one do I use, I say:  IT ALL DEPENDS ON  MY MOOD! It also depends on what it is I want to accomplish and how.

My favorite online html editor now Kompozer. It is no longer called Nvu. It is now called Kompozer. Just click on the link to download Kompozer. Nvu and Kompozer are open source. I have Nvu on my laptop and Kompozer on my desk top. I use them both. These are free online editors that you can download right on to your computer's hard drive. It is a program that you can use off line.  There are times when I like to write offline especially living in Florida. We get power outages and daily storms. So when I want to write I do not have to be on the internet in order to draft my posts for my blog.

The features I like best in Nvu: ( Kompozer)

• Offline editor

• Save draft posts to external hardrive for copyright reasons ( among other reasons)

• Work on several posts at one time and move easily file to file

• The developers are always improving the product

• I like to save most of my posts on my external hard drive to gather data for writing books later on.

• Contains a CSS editor

• Powered by Mozilla

• Just like in Firefox, you can have one screen open and edit several documents at once.
  

• Move between Htmls and WYSIWYG easily. ( Wish AR had that feature:)

• You can customize all sorts of things with Kompozer if you do happen to know html. When you add an image, you can change your code right underneath the photo in a box that shows up with the source code. It is really neat!
  

The drawbacks to Nvu:

• You have to remember to delete the first 3 lines or so of html code in draft mode on the Active Rain editor.

• To add images in Nvu, you have to have a URL for the image. That means that you will have to upload your photos to Photobucket, Flickr or Picasa Web which adds an extra step.

•  BUT this is NOT the case with Kompozer! With Kompozer- you can do all sorts of cool things with your images. You can load them from your computer's hard drive, you can add alt 1 image tags and you can embed links right into your images.
  

To avoid this step you can grab the source code, ( html code) from Nvu, paste it in Active Rain html editor, then publish to draft. Then go back in under WYSIWYG editor in Active Rain and add your images from your computer the ordinary way.


The next online editor that I use quite a bit is the new  Box. net Web Builder Page. I really like this online editor. You have to be online to use this editor.  I like to use Box.net for posts that take up a  lot of space such as my tutorials because the files are stored in your Box.net account. I wrote a post on how to write a post using the Web Page builder here.

The features I like best in Box.net Web Builder Page:

• Online editor

• Online storage area

• You can share the files and others can add to your post before you publish. Great for team articles.

• You can access your files from anywhere and from any computer.

• You can add images from your computer without the extra step of uploading them to Photobucket, etc.

• It has an auto save feature so if you forget to click save often; it does it by default for you.

The drawbacks to Box.net:

• Some people have said the source code does not convert correctly in Active Rain html editor. I have not ever had a problem with converting.

• You can not add alt 1 image tags in Box.net. I have put in a suggest request to their developers to add this feature.

• You can not add link titles to your links. To deal with this, just add your links after you post to draft in Active Rain editor.

When I use Box.net- I use it for the font sizing, colors and highlighting. I then add the images and links in the Active Rain WYSIWYG editor.

A very fast and easy online editor is Online-html-editor.de. This is an open source product from Germany. When you go into this program you need to click on the English tab in order to use the editor in English. Of course, if you speak German and want to publish in Germany then go for it the way it is.

The features I like best about Online-html- editor.de :

• Online editor

• Fast and Easy

• The code seems to have no issues moving over to the Active Rain html editor. 

• I use this editor when I want to post something very fast such as the Thank You for Happy Birthday that I don't care about saving.

• The image feature is great. It has really good alt 1 image tag feature but you have to grab the URL so you do need to upload your images to Photobucket, Flickr or Picasa Web.

• This editor has a simple and good link title tag feature. 

The drawbacks to this editor:

• I don't like how you can not save the draft unless you save it as online as an html file on a web page.

• There are too many steps in order to save files.

• It does not have an auto save feature.

• I can not use this editor if I am doing a longer post that I need to come back to later.

• You can not upload images from your computer so there is an added step.

I use all of these editors like I said depending on what it is I want to accomplish.
You can try them each out and see which one you like best or you can use them all. My favorite one is the new Kompozer! It wins on every front.

Have some fun adding some color, highlighting, font sizes and other features these html editors offer without spending hundreds of dollars on fancy programs that you have to learn. These programs have the same features that Microsoft Front Page, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs have.

You don't have to learn html to use these editors. You just write in English just as you want to see it when it is published.
Then just click on 'source' which turns all your work into html code with a click of a button.
Then copy and paste that source code into the Active Rain Editor under the html editor tab.

One of the biggest tips I can give you about this is to make sure that you post to draft first, then check to make sure you like what you see in the Active Rain draft mode before you publish your post.

The learning curve on all of these is very fast and painless.

Have FUN!

 

        

How To Jazz Up Your Blogging- Free and Easy!  by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.