Flippant Remarks about Blogger™ for Word
After watching the Channel9 post a few weeks ago, two remarks shoot out:
- Blogger is based on Visual Basic version 6.0 (VB6), written by a “third-party.”
- Blogger needs an entire Word Document devoted to one Blog post.
Using VB6 cuts through all of the compatibility problems any developer will have trying to write code for the Word “platform”—or Office System Platform. Without seeing the code, I assume that it either a heroic effort of monumental proportions or it’s a tiny little ditty that uses Regular expressions and hand-made SOAP calls. After glancing at “Blogger for Word FAQ and Known Issues,” I can see a dependency on Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) 3.0 Service Pack 5 (SP5). My guess is that Blogger tries to get out of the Word object model as quickly as it can by exporting to a temporary HTML file and then devoting most of the automation to processing this file. I guess only “dummies” like me are foolish enough to stay inside of Word as long as possible before export. But seriously, this is the only solution when you desire to serve as many Word users as possible.
My captive hope is that Blogger for Word will create the expectation that the Word Processor needs this “remote publishing” capability—so a more generic solution will evolve from this tool. The Word Processor needs to “discover” remote entry points and save them in the document metadata. These entry points are the publishing locations for that document. InfoPath already has a similar concept it calls “Submit Options” or “Data Connections.” As of now, my work allows me to use Copy and Paste…
This VB6-based version of Blogger solves part of the problem now—and a big-ass company like Google can afford to completely rewrite (or re-purchase) a new version of Blogger that takes advantage of developer features in future versions of Office System.