Microsoft come in for a lot of flack from the OSS world and the Mac users think they are better than everyone else when it comes to software. But I was surprised again today by how good Windows Live Writer integrates with my WordPress Blog, to such an extent that I will in all probability not use the WordPress WYSIWYG editor in the browser, for which I have a reason or two. Firstly, the WYSIWYG editor runs in the browser and I find quite a few things annoying:

• When I create a blockquote it adds a lot of spacing around it for some reason
• When I update a post or page the scrollbar will go to the top, instead of staying where I last edited
• The working area is relatively small

Compare this to what Windows Live Writer offers:

• Seemless integration with the blog engine. It was so easy to setup and it detects everything, from your theme to all your posts
• When you write a post you can edit it directly on a themed page, or you can do it in source view. You can also preview it perfectly
• You have access to ctrl + b, ctrl + i. A total lie on my part. I was using the HTML view here and not the Visual View! WordPress does support ctrl + b and crtrl + i.
  
• You dont lose scroll position
• Publishing is easy and seemless

So in my view Microsoft have really done well with this free piece of software, it just works, and it works better than some Firefox plugins I have used as well.

Wow, what a difference the Dashboard is. Its a total revamp, and I totally like it. Amazing work these guys put into this Blog CMS.

Today I also experimented briefly with the Extended Desktop feature that comes with some graphics accelerators. I am specifically referring to one that I have running on a HP laptop. What this particular accelerator does is allow you to create an extended desktop,  and with that feature you can run the Presenter view in Powerpoint, which basically allows you to run the presentation without the audience seeing the details of the PowerPoint interface. In other words all they get to see is the Slide Show, nothing else of what you are doing. So, I decided to create a little WPF application that has a width greater than the monitor size, and low and behold it overflows onto the other screen. This is interesting for several reasons. Firstly PowerPoint is not great for everything, and one thing it is not good at is displaying data. This often means that if you have an Access Database you will have to write some VBA code to extract that data and display it. So I thought that maybe the other option could be to write a WPF app that displays content on an extended desktop.  If that works its quite feasible to write better logic for everthing and actually use relational data.

At the moment it feels like I am re-designing a navigation system that has probably already been built before. The reason for saying this is because the navigation controls provided to you by Visual Studio 2008 produce table-based layouts, which is not what I want for my website. I want my website to generate valid XHTML and use CSS for layout. So what do I need? I need a navigation system that generates valid CSS and XHTML and that is easy to administer and update without having to meddle in C#, XHTML or CSS code. How do I achieve this goal? Would I have to write my own custom navigation system? It seems so for now. The basic structure of the navigation system would allow for a maximum of three levels of navigation:

• A top level
• A second level
• A third level

The navigation system will at all times make the user aware of where they are in the website, which can be achieved with a breadcrumb navigation system. Each navigation item will display its own associated content. Second level navigation items will have top level navigation item parents and third level navigation items will have second level navigation item parents. The navigation system will also act as a source for creating the site map structure. If a visitor clicks on any item in the top navigation area then content associated with that item will be displayed and the active top level navigation item will show its active. The second level navigation items that are displayed will be associated with the top level item. If a visitor clicks any of the second level navigation items the one that is clicked will become active and content associated with the second level navigation item will be displayed and the second level navigation item that is clicked will show that is active. If the second level navigation item has third level navigation items associated with it then those items will be displayed. If a visitor clicks on the third level navigation item then that item becomes active and content for it will be displayed and that third level item shows that it is active.

The next step is to create an object-oriented design from this structure. Using an object-oriented approach would allow for easy re-use throughout. So lets say we create a class called “section” and give it the following fields:

• ParentSectionField – This will indicate if there is a parent item
• SectionField – This will indicate what the current section is
• SectionHierarchy – This will indicate where in the navigation hierarchy the section item belongs.

The other issue that is a concern for me is content management, and understanding why it is important. Content management is important because it alleviates the need to mess with the code in your website. If your website has a decent content management system you will have a consistent look and feel throughout the website and you will be able to change that look and feel with a few clicks. WordPress is a perfect example of just that. WordPress allows you to easily change themes by uploading it to a directory and by changing it in your admin panel. WordPress is a clear example of design being a layer on top of the underlying function. Content management systems are ideally defined as a layer of functionality or business logic with another layer of presentation logic on top of that. Content management systems are also characterised by its development frameworks. Development frameworks can be seen as large collections of functionality assembled into one component. ASP.NET is an example of a framework technology, because it provides a whole host of features and functionality that you do not have to re-develop to make use of. The ASP.NET Roles and Membership functionality comes to mind, and is not too difficult to implement and administer without having to write much code. The advantage of this is that these features take advantage of the framework features across the whole website. The Roles and Membership feature in ASP.NET is an example of this, because you could easily manage more than one website’s user base from a central administrator control panel. You would not have to re-code the model for each website.

I regularly check out www.jimmyr.com for the top digg posts and images and I also clicked through to another very popular web design portal called Smashing Magazine and found their one of their latest articles with 30 “free” wordpress themes from which I found my current website’s theme. Its really quite clean and crisp

So I noticed that my site had an incoming link (the WordPress dashboard shows this) and I clicked on that link and came across this site where they have an exact copy of one of my articles. On the same site I clicked through to the WordPress blog and saw that they have updated their theme directory. The theme directory seems to contain a few nice looking themes and one in particular seems cool, and I have decided to use it. Its called Amazing Grace and worked well the first time. Its interesting to see that WordPress 2.6 now creates a little theme preview window. Nice touch.

While chilling to Armin van Buuren’s A State of Trance Episode 356 I decided to instal Wordbook, a plugin that:

Use your WordPress blog to publish updates to your Profile Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds.

It takes a few seconds to download the WordBook plugin and a few more seconds to extract the contents and upload it to a webserver. Once uploaded go to “Settings”, where you will be prompted to provide a one-time code, which is generated through Facebook. The code just allows you to post on WordPress and this allows the posts to be displayed on your Facebook profile, without having to login to Facebook. This is my first post with this plug in! So I will see if it works!

Its sad to say but the WordPress theme directory is not up to scratch. The themes seem old and out of date. I have added a new theme called TechJunkie and it seems like a pretty awesome theme.