The problematic situation I wrote about yesterday has a happy ending after all. At 8:30pm last night I was left a voicemail message from Nelson, a Customer Service Rep in a Phoenix, AZ office. Nelson was the last person I had spoken to that afternoon, and his message stated that he had been bothered all day about how they had not resolved my problem, so he did some extra research and spoke again with his supervisor, finally securing me clearance for a refund. Hallelujah!

So, because of Nelson in Phoenix, I will continue to be a reasonably happy USAirways customer. – Thanks, Nelson!

This afternoon I went online to purchase a ticket from USAirways to travel from LGA to visit my family in Pittsburgh. When I arrived at the website, I was asked if I would be willing to try their new website. When I clicked “Yes”, I was redirected to the new site (www2.usairways.com) and went through the  reservation process without any problems. During the checkout, they offered a “USAirways Club Day Pass” for an additional $40. I was reserving for a direct flight and certainly don’t need to visit their “club” at the airport, so I declined the offer, however, after filling out my credit card info and clicking submit, I WAS charged $40 for the Day Pass.

Figuring that there was some mistake, I telephoned customer support and after 40 minutes and being transferred around, the final verdict was that the $40 was NOT REFUNDABLE. The sympathetic customer service rep suggested that I file a complaint using their form (http://www.usairways.com/awa/content/contact/customer_relationsform.aspx), which I did. The text of my message to them:

I used you new usairways.com website to order my ticket this afternoon. During the checkout process, I was offered the option of purchasing a Club Day Pass for $40. My flight is a direct flight. I have no need for a club pass, and am SURE that I selected "NO" for this option, however, once I submitted my order, the Day Pass had been included against my wishes. It seems this is an error in your new website, and I spent over 40 minutes on the phone with various customer service people who only informed me that the $40 IS NOT REFUNDABLE.

I am appalled at this situation.

I have been a customer for many years, a Dividend Miles account holder AND use the USAirways Mastercard and feel slapped in the face by this treatment.

At this point I am very disappointed in my own experience, and want to warn you – if you are purchasing a ticket from their website – DOUBLE-CHECK right before you submit your order that a Club Day Pass has not been included, unless you ordered one.

If I receive any positive response regarding my complaint, I will update this post accordingly. In the meantime – buyer beware.

UPDATE 8/27/2009: I have now been promised a refund – read all about it.

Victor and I belong to a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture program) which brings us tons of fresh, ripe, local, organic produce each week. Yum! The past few weeks have provided peaches, plums and nectarines in our fruit share. One particular variety of peaches I just want to mention specifically.

Donut peaches have a less-than appealing name (at least to me, since I’m not a big fan of traditional, gummy, doughnuts), but the name is actually referring to their “squashed” round shape. The really amazing thing about these peaches is their succulent, juiciness. I would describe them as having a flowery sweet taste. It is delicate and truly delicious. So far we have gotten a few different varieties, ones that are pinkish-white, pale green, and a more traditional yellowish-orange color. The bonus is that they come away from the pit easily, making them a great snack.

On Sunday I was invited by my good friend and stylist Monica Diaz to a Trunk Show for an awesome NYC-based designer, Roxi Suger and her line called AngelRox. Roxi’s fun, versatile designs are also eco-friendly and are sewn with fair labor practices, which makes them doubly cool.

If you have spent any time doing web development or updating your blog or website using some sort of Content Management System,  you have likely come across the problem of converting MS Word files into HTML code. It seems like it would be a simple operation – Word does include a “Save As Webpage…” option, but if you take a look at the HTML generated you would be disappointed to see what a mess it is.

Cleaning up Word-junked content before using it online is very important for code compliance and decent, consistent display. Sure the simplest way to strip out Word garbage is to just copy and paste the text from Word into a basic text editor, then copy & paste it from the text editor to your email, blog, or CMS interface. The only problem is that this strips out ALL formatting, which you will need to painstakingly recreate for your online publishing. If you have long formatted documents, this will quickly become tedious and error-prone.

The other option is to seek out a “cleaning” or conversion utility, which would take either a regular Word Doc and convert it to compliant HTML, or would take a “Save As Webpage…” word-generated HTML file, and strip out the Word-only HTML crap. In general< i have found that these tools do a decent job of generating clean code that still includes the basic formatting tags that are necessary for proper display.

As a web developer who has been dealing with this issue for over a decade, I have certainly tried many solutions and have yet to find my “holy-grail”. The main problem I have found with conversion/cleanup programs is that they aren’t smart enough to convert Word-styled bulleted lists into properly formatted <ul>/<li> code. Believe me, the utility that can do THAT will be the winner in my book.

So, here are a handful of options for your Word-to-HTML projects.

Online Utilities

Recommended

Textism.com Word HTML Cleaner
http://www.textism.com/wordcleaner/
COST: Word files up to 20Kb are free, larger files require an inexpensive subscription (€5 - €20)
HOW-TO: Save a Word document ‘as Web Page…’ to your hard drive, then upload to the website
NOTES: Does a good job, but doesn't fix converted lists.

WordOff
http://wordoff.org/
COST: free
HOW-TO: Save a Word document ‘as Web Page…’ to your hard drive, then open it in notepad, copy & paste the HTML to the form on the website
NOTES: Does a good job, but doesn't fix converted lists.

Not Recommended

HTML Tidy Online
http://infohound.net/tidy/
COST: free
HOW-TO: Save a Word document ‘as Web Page…’ to your hard drive, then upload to website, or paste in some HTML from the saved Word doc
NOTES: For the "Tidy Settings" check "Clean" and "Word 2000" for best results. Doesn't remove Word styles (class="MsoBodyText", etc.), doesn't fix converted lists.

Microsoft Word 2000 HTML Mess Cleaner
http://www.algotech.dk/word-html-cleaner-input.htm
COST: free
HOW-TO: Save a Word document ‘as Web Page…’ to your hard drive, then open it in notepad, copy & paste the HTML to the form on the website
NOTES: Converts paragraphs using <BR> tags, which isn't ideal.

Desktop Installed Programs

Somewhat Recommended

Firefox Add-on: Html Validator
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/249
COST: free
HOW-TO: Save a Word document ‘as Web Page…’ to your hard drive, then open it with Firefox. Go to Edit > View Source..., click the "Clean up this page..." button
NOTES: Requires that you have Firefox web browser installed. Doesn't remove Word styles (class="MsoBodyText", etc.), doesn't fix converted lists.

Zapadoo Word Cleaner
http://www.zapadoo.com/wordcleaner/
COST: $99
HOW-TO: Drag-n-Drop or open Word Docs into the program, choose the appropriate conversion template and click a button
NOTES: Can convert many documents at once, very full-featured including the ability to customize your own "templates" for cleaning, though I was dissapointed that the included templates don’t handle lists the way I want. I haven’t been able to  configure a custom one to my standards after spending quite some time on it.

RTF to XHTML Converter
http://rtftohtml.com/
COST: $34.50 (€29)
HOW-TO: In Word, save as RTF file, browse to it in the program, set an output file path, click "Convert" button
NOTES: This program did properly convert lists to <li> tags, but it also added all sorts of extra <div> and <span> tags with useless style info. There aren't any options to exclude this sort of formatting, which would have made this program a winner. Unfortunately, it just doesn't strip out enough junk.

WordHTML CV
http://www.technoriversoft.com/wordtohtmlconverter.html
COST: free
HOW-TO: Drag-n-Drop your Word Doc onto the program window
NOTES: Doesn't remove Word styles (class="MsoBodyText", etc.), doesn't fix converted lists

Not Recommended

Web Code Converter
http://www.web-code-converter.com/
COST: $19.95
NOTES: I couldn't test this, since it opened with an error message. Re-installing didn’t help.

Atrise ToHTML
http://www.atrise.com/to-html/
COST: $25
HOW-TO: Drag & Drop your Word Doc onto the little program window
NOTES: Easy to use, but not recommended because it strips out ALL formatting, leaving only paragraph breaks. I would expect more functionality for $25.

Word2html LT
http://www.wordcnv.com/word2html-lt.html
COST: €40
HOW-TO: Browse to your file, click Open.
NOTES: Even though their website claims "Full support of bullets and numbered lists" I found that it wasn't the case. No <li> in sight. I was also unimpressed with its inability to figure out heading tags.

Convert Doc
http://www.softinterface.com/Convert-Doc/Features/Convert-DOC-To-HTML.htm
COST: free, as far as I could tell
HOW-TO: Browse to your file, set some options, click Convert.
NOTES: Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to do very much differently than Word's own "Save As HTML" option. If you have other file conversion needs, though (PDFs, etc) you might find this a useful program.

WordToWeb 2.5
http://www.solutionsoft.com/w2w.htm
COST: $299
HOW-TO: Uses a Wizard-like interface to browse to your file, set a gazillion options and finally Convert.
NOTES: This has a lot of options to create webpages from your Word docs, but as far as I can tell, it does a terrible job at cleaning the html produced - if anything it seems to ADD extra junk.

 

If you have a favorite, feel free to post a link in the comments.

I love Content Management Systems and now always use them for my clients’ websites – no matter how “small” their site is. 

If you are thinking about moving to a CMS for your website, I say GO FOR IT! The flexibility it offers is totally worth it. There are a lot of options, both free (usually open source) and paid. If you want to research different ones, check out this site: http://cmsmatrix.org (ugly, but useful – though keep in mind that not all the listings are updated frequently, so you should check the CMS’s website for the latest info.)

The CMS I personally use for all my client’s websites is called umbraco (http://www.umbraco.org) My experience is with .Net (Microsoft) programming languages, which is why having an ASP.Net CMS is important for me, as a developer. This would be less an issue from a content producer’s/site owner’s view point.

The things I like the best about umbraco:

• free and open-source
• allows for ANY visual design (including those using JavaScript and Flash)
• extremely flexible and easy to develop for
• it’s very simple to build a site using search engine optimization best practices
• adding Google Analytics and other services is super easy
• can integrate any other .Net system in one way or another (most useful for more advanced applications)
• friendly and responsive community and core developer team
• attractive and “modern” looking backend (what the content producer and developer sees and works with)
• basically ANYTHING can be done with an umbraco site with some more advanced programming

The things that would be important to a content producer are somewhat different. Take a look here: http://umbraco.org/tour and click the big life vest (“For end users”) for some examples.

The only thing I would caution about umbraco, is that due to its flexible and customizable nature, setting up a website in it is somewhat more complex than some other “just install it” systems (and if you are not that technically inclined or want an exact conversion of a current website to umbraco, some professional developer assistance is required), but once your site is set up, it’s very easy for the content producers to use.

If you have a current website and plan to keep the same visual design and content layout, you will need to select your CMS carefully, since some of them have limited design options (frequently using a concept of “modules”, which is essentially little boxes of content), or insisting on 2 or 3 column design, or forcing you to use a certain “template” design which has limited customization options. So keep that in mind.

This is one of the big things I like about umbraco, since it doesn’t limit your design in any way and can produce web standards compliant code. (Which helps your site look similar in different browsers, and allows for better SEO indexing, etc.)

If you’d like to get an idea of the variety of sites that can be designed using umbraco, you can see sites I’ve done in it:

Generous Orthodoxy – a content-rich site I implemented for a minister

The Heart and Soul Fund – a non-profit website

Booker T Washington Learning Center – another non-profit organization website

Floyd Innovations - my consulting website

Whole Web Impact – my online marketing for independent professionals website

And also there is an international portfolio of umbraco sites by different designers.

 

If you plan on having a business based solely online, Blogging to the Bank 3.0 is a good, quick way to get started with a proven business plan. At only 58 pages, it is a quick read, but everything is presented in a step-by-step manner which even a technology novice should be able to follow easily.

If your business is only partially based on blogging (as a marketing supplement to your website, etc), some of the additional monetization strategies Benwell outlines might not be completely appropriate, unless you can add them subtly to your blog, but all of the other content is relevant for any type of blogging.

One strong point of this e-book is the simple WordPress installation instructions, which detail getting a hosting account setup and WordPress loaded. (Benwell believes as I do that it is essential for you to fully control your own domain and web space.)

For those who might already have a blog, or are not using WordPress, the chapters on “Content” and “Web 2.0 Strategies” will be useful.

For those of you who are just getting into search engine optimization (SEO), the chapters on “Market Research & Keyphrase Lists” and “Advanced SEO Techniques” will get you up to speed quickly.

Many of the techniques I advocate, including building backlinks through article syndication and forum participation are mentioned.

Overall I reccommend this to anyone interested in using a blog for business.

You can get your copy here: Purchase Blogging to the Bank 3.0 online

Still questing for the best in desktop blogging tools...

ScribeFire installs into the Firefox browser, which is interesting because you can click between tabs in the upper area, while editing your posts below:

But this means you are dealing with a squished web browsing experience as well as a squished editing experience. Opening a new Firefox window for ScribeFire would take care of this, I imagine.

Account Setup

Setup using the account wizard's "Custom Blog" options was pretty straightforward. I didn't encounter any errors.

Post Editor

The WYSIWYG editor includes the expected basic options (no tables, etc, though for blogging that isn't necessarily a bad thing), with the ability to switch over to HTML view or "Live Preview" as well. (It doesn’t preserve your location in the document when switching to HTML view and has no syntax formatting/highlighting, however.)

Due to the limited WYSIWYG options, the code stays pretty clean. I noticed that if you copy and paste HTML into a post (from a webpage, for instance) it preserves the HTML associated with it (h1 tags, etc.) There doesn't seem to be CSS integration, so you can’t easily assign your own classes (without editing the HTML), though you can set formatting changes to be saved in CSS rather than HTML (in the Settings).

It had problems with code - if I pasted HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor, it correctly encoded it and showed the code, but after publishing, it had converted it so that the HTML output was displayed instead. This is actually a HUGE shortcoming which will make this software useless to techie-bloggers.

Images

You can easily copy & paste images directly into the posts, however I found that upon publishing, the images were not automatically uploaded and resulted in missing chunks (represented by little grey boxes):


So, you can upload an image via FTP or the API while adding it to your post. No fancy formatting or cropping options (or alt tags/captions either).

Spell Checking

Inline spell check is provided by Firefox:

Posting

Clicking the "Publish to " button results in some nice easy to understand options:

("View this Blog" opens your blog homepage in the web browser area above.)

But the problem I noticed was that if you "Keep Content" and make changes and then "Publish" - it creates another post rather than overwriting the existing post, which is really annoying. However, if you DO NOT choose the "Keep Content", and instead just click on your new post in the "Posts" list in the right sidebar, you will have the ability to "Publish as Edit" or "Delete Post".

Working Offline

Though you can easily access and edit existing posts by choosing them from the "Posts" tab:


I couldn't locate any offline saved post files which might be accessible while not connected to the internet.

Blog Options

I was able to check off my Categories (called "tags" in the software, which seems to have eliminated the actual "Tags" (aka keywords) which were nowhere to be found.)

Interesting Features

There is a button to "Save as Note", but I was unable to figure out what that might be, other than kind of like a draft of the post accessible from the "Notes" tab of the right sidebar.

Final Opinion

For Firefox lovers, ScribeFire is a nice and generally bug-free tool. For those looking for a more robust blogging tool which can also be used offline, it might be less ideal.

How to Get It

Name: ScribeFire
Platform: Any with Firefox installed
Version Reviewed: v. 1.4.2
Price: FREE
Website: http://www.scribefire.com and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1730

So, here is another desktop blogging tool I am testing. Let’s see how it stacks up.

Account Setup

To use with BlogEngine.Net, you need to choose "MetaWeblog API" and I had a bit of trouble because it asks you to point to a file called XML-RPC:

Setting up Post2Blog for use with BlogEngine.net

And worse, suggests that it will be in a php file. So, if you put in a link to "metaweblog.axd" as is suggested by the BlogEngine.Net documentation, you will most likely get an error (at least I did). Here is how to get around that - put in "rsd.axd" instead. This should allow you to finish the New Account Wizard. Of course, then you will possibly get another error when you actually try to connect to your blog (to "Update Blogs and Categories", for instance) so this is where you Edit your profile and change it to "metaweblog.axd." At least these gymnastics worked for me.

Post Editor

The main workspace is a full-featured WYSIWYG editor, with the ability to switch over to HTML view as well. (Unfortunately it doesn’t jump to the current area in the HTML file when you switch over.) It includes all the goodies you’d expect and works well. Keep in mind, though, that as with most WYSIWYGs, the generated HTML can get unwieldy with extra tags and things like unexpected font tags, etc. There isn’t any CSS integration, so you can’t easily assign your own classes. Also, there isn’t any syntax highlighting or formatting in the HTML view.

Images

A very convenient feature (especially for people grabbing screenshots or pieces of larger images) is the ability to just copy & paste images into a post. When you click in your post and Paste, you get the image properties dialog box:

Image Properties Dialog

Which allows you some nifty options like automatically converting the image to a web-friendly type, assigning a caption, creating a linked thumbnail, and adding a (sort of ugly) drop-shadow. Some caveats - in order to have the caption show the way it does, tables are drawn around images along with some extra font tags, etc.:

Spell Checking

Inline automatic spell-checking (like in MS Word) is a great feature for those who like it (and can easily be turned off for those who don’t), and you can also set an option to run the spell checker before you publish your post.

Posting

I encountered some problems while posting, which might be due to some of the more crazy HTML, or maybe the problem with categories, or who knows what... It deleted the post title, which I had to restore in BlogEngine.Net. 

Working Offline

There is a nice interface to view & select the current posts:

But when opening posts, it seems that the images were all broken - they were pointing to local temp files rather than the published online images, which I think would be more correct, especially once a post has been published. There is an option under the Tools menue to "Download all images as local images", but clicking that didn't seem to do anything to fix the issue. 

Blog Options

Post2Blog didn’t read my Categories correctly - it shows the descriptions rather than the category names (which also means that any categories which don’t have a descriptions are totally missing). I’m not sure if this is an error with the program, or with the implementation of MetaWeblog that BlogEngine.Net uses...

I didn't see anywhere that Tags (aka keywords) could be assigned to a post.

Interesting Features

"Portable Version" allows you to create a version with all your settings that can be run from USB flash drives etc.

Firefox & Internet Explorer Add-ins for fast blogging from webpages.

"Quick  Snippets" allow you to define chunks of text/HTML which can be quickly inserted, and you can setup abbreviated text which when typed will be automatically replaced with the defined text/HTML. This is a good way to add support for additional HTML tags, or speed up the inserting of common stuff (for instance, a link to your company website whenever you mention your company).

Integration with popular online services includes special support for Flickr photos, Amazon, Adsense,Chitika eMinimall, and Tagging Services (Technorati, Del.icio.us, Buzzwords, 43 Things, etc)

Colored Syntax highlighting for various programming & markup languages. Just select some text and choose Insert > Highlighted Code... You can choose the language and font:

Keep in mind that the code isn't perfect - see my syntax highlighted HTML, above (also, I added the tabs & line breaks - it doesn't preserve them when you paste the code in)

Insert > Current Music exists, but when I attempted to use it, it insisted on opening iTunes, even though I already had Windows Media Player running, so I guess it only works with iTunes. 

Final Opinion

Generally there is a lot to reccommend this software, but it's implementation in relation to BlogEngine.Net isn't that great. There are some very basic things that hinder using it, specifically, how it handles images and categories and its lack of support for Tags/Keywords. Since this used to be a fully-supported paid product and is now in the unsupported freeware category, I have some concerns that it won't soon be updated or enhanced.

How to Get It

Name: Post2Blog [Bytescout]
Platform: Windows
Version Reviewed: v. 3.01
Price: FREE
Website: http://post2blog.com

w.bloggar is a desktop blogging tool. Since I am looking for ways to make blogging easier and more fun, this is a test post & review.

Account Setup

This is one of the very few blogging tools which specifically has support for BlogEngine.Net blogs, which can be chosen as the blog service when setting up the account. It worked flawlessly.

Post Editor

The main workspace is a HTML editor. The toolbar has the standard HTML markers (Bold, Italic, Underline, Strike-through), though unlike a WYSIWYG editor, it doesn't show the formatting, it adds in the HTML code, which won't be a big deal to HTML proficient people, but will throw off those who aren't. Of course, you can switch over to the Preview tab at any time.
w.bloggar - Editor

w.bloggar - Preview

Images

Unlike WLW, you can't just copy & paste a picture into a post. You need to save it with a filename, and upload it (though the upload box has the option to automatically insert either an IMG tag or a download (A HREF tag) link for the file you are uploading. However, since you are working in an HTML editor, you cannot drag to resize images, and instead need to manually calculate the correct width/height ratio and input it into the IMG tag. Also, if you want a smaller image in your post which links to the full-sized version, you need to manually add the link for that.

Spell Checking

The Spell checking feature is adequate, though it picks up some HTML tags and special characters:

 

and doesn't always suggest the best default change option:

 

Posting

Post & Publish worked quickly and smoothly, though I personally would rather that w.bloggar would leave the post open (since I might want to make changes again). Instead it automatically clears it out of the workspace and opens a new blank post. You can get it back by choosing "Last Post" from the Posts drop-down:

 If you choose one of the other options (Last 5, Last 10, etc.) a box listing the posts pops up so you can select the post you want to edit:

 

Although listing the posts by ID rather than title or even date is not the most usable. (There is also an option to get a post by typing in its ID, which, for Blog systems using a GUID (such as BlogEngine.Net), isn't as useable either.

Working Offline 

w.bloggar doesn't automatically save posts on your harddrive (which can be a good thing if you don't want to clutter up your computer). If you want to keep an offline copy of your post, you can save it to a .post file, which can then be opened in w.bloggar later. Generally this functionality will meet your offline working needs. 

Blog Options

w.bloggar handles Categories beautifully, even providing a "Reload" option to refresh the categories list if you added additional categories from inside your web-based blog interface while the program is open. It supports assigning multiple Categories to posts.

Tags (in w.bloggar the field is called "Keywords") are also handled nicely. There is a textbox for them on the "More" tab of the workspace. Just type them in separated by commas.

Interesting Features

Ability to create custom tags (which is a way to add in styles (div or span with class info) or html tags that aren't included (like PRE, CODE, H4, etc), though some might argue that all the basic HTML tags should already be available in the editor.

Ability to set properties (on a per-blog basis) for the Preview tab. You can make the preview more accurately match how your posts will look on your blog by setting refrences to your CSS or by adding style information directly.

Automatically add the music you are listening to. You can choose whether to add it automatically to all posts, or manually by clicking a button.

Here is an example:

 

Final Opinion

This could be a fantastic tool if it had a proper WYSIWYG editor. Unless you are an HTML purist, it seems to me that it's easier to use the web-based BlogEngine.Net WYSIWYG posting tool. However, it would be a decent tool to use in an offline-pinch.

How to Get It

Name: w.bloggar [Marcelo Lv Cabral]
Platform: Windows
Version Reviewed: v. 4.02
Price: FREE
Website: http://wbloggar.com/