Blogging with style ?

If it exists, can someone point me to a blogging tool
that relies for formatting on one (or a FEW) external
stylesheets instead of embedding (and repeating!) tons
of CSS and font tags within the text?

Preferably, the tool will also generate relatively simple
static HTML, XHTML, or XML, instead of assembling entries
and elements on the fly by Javascript and/or CGI.

Would ALSO be nice if it didn't lay things out
by deeply-nested tables.

Am I asking too much?

--
Wes Groleau

Even if you do learn to speak correct English,
whom are you going to speak it to?
-- Clarence Darrow

Wes Groleau <groleau+news (AT) freeshell (DOT) org> writes:

If it exists, can someone point me to a blogging tool
that relies for formatting on one (or a FEW) external
stylesheets instead of embedding (and repeating!) tons
of CSS and font tags within the text?

Kinda sorta. Depends what else you're looking for in a blogging tool,
which of course depends what kind of blogging you're doing. Mine was
designed for sharing personal/family news illustrated by photos.

http://ourdoings.com/csstest1/

The offline blogging tool would be your favorite text editor. Files
with contents of the form "YYYY-MM-DD Text" can be combined into a zip
file for one-step uploading. Then ourdoings.com does the kind of simple
external-CSS-driven formatting you describe. But if you were looking
for a tool to make pages to store on your own web space then
ourdoings.com doesn't help.

Am I asking too much?

Nope. If anything, ask even more specifically.

--

http://ourdoings.com/ Easily organize and disseminate news and
photos for your family or group.

Bruce Lewis wrote:

Wes Groleau <groleau+news (AT) freeshell (DOT) org> writes:

If it exists, can someone point me to a blogging tool
that relies for formatting on one (or a FEW) external
stylesheets instead of embedding (and repeating!) tons
of CSS and font tags within the text?

Kinda sorta. Depends what else you're looking for in a blogging tool,
which of course depends what kind of blogging you're doing. Mine was
designed for sharing personal/family news illustrated by photos.

http://ourdoings.com/csstest1/

The offline blogging tool would be your favorite text editor. Files
with contents of the form "YYYY-MM-DD Text" can be combined into a zip
file for one-step uploading. Then ourdoings.com does the kind of simple
external-CSS-driven formatting you describe. But if you were looking
for a tool to make pages to store on your own web space then
ourdoings.com doesn't help.

Am I asking too much?

Nope. If anything, ask even more specifically.

Thanks. I was kvetching as much as wishing. I was just astounded
at the CRAP generated by one of those "easy-to-use" WYSIWYG
commercial products. (Which by the way, was NOT easy to use,
nor was it fully WYSIWYG).

If it takes me _one_ hour with TextEdit to create a web page that looks
almost as good, but takes up less then a tenth of the disk space, has
NO Javascript, can have the look of umpteen entries modified by
tweaking ONE CSS file, and especially doesn't have single-cell tables
nested six deep, then in _two_ hours, I ought to be able to write a
perl script that will do the same thing inputting only the parts that
differ between entries.

However, before writing it, I thought I'd check whether someone else
already did.

--
Wes Groleau

People would have more leisure time if it weren't
for all the leisure-time activities that use it up.
-- Peg Bracken

"Wes Groleau" <groleau+news (AT) freeshell (DOT) org> wrote

If it exists, can someone point me to a blogging tool
that relies for formatting on one (or a FEW) external
stylesheets instead of embedding (and repeating!) tons
of CSS and font tags within the text?

Preferably, the tool will also generate relatively simple
static HTML, XHTML, or XML, instead of assembling entries
and elements on the fly by Javascript and/or CGI.

Would ALSO be nice if it didn't lay things out
by deeply-nested tables.

Am I asking too much?

I use blogger, and get it to upload html files to my site and it does a
pretty good job.

The thing with this is that you can use templates from the site, or you can
write your own. If you use one from the site then who knows what you'll get,
but if you write your own, you do it in plain text, and you can point to
external stylesheets elswhere on your hosting, and control how much junk is
in the html.

I think this applies with other tools too (web based and ones you install on
your own server). Try finding the edit template options, and write your own
template.

M

Martin Eyles wrote:

The thing with this is that you can use templates from the site, or you can
write your own. If you use one from the site then who knows what you'll get,
but if you write your own, you do it in plain text, and you can point to
external stylesheets elswhere on your hosting, and control how much junk is
in the html.

I think this applies with other tools too (web based and ones you install on
your own server). Try finding the edit template options, and write your own
template.

I guess some blogtools have templates and some have a limited
set of "themes" to choose from.

For now, I'm just pasting text directly into HTML.

Eventually, I'll write something simple in perl to do part of the work.

--
Wes Groleau

"There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over."
-- Larry Wall