Blogging from the Server Side

The latest release of Compendium Blogware that went live today included a big change that will benefit our content authors -- a new editing environment.

For the past year or so, we've been using the rich text editor supplied by the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library. It's pretty powerful, but it had enough weaknesses to motivate us to look for a replacement.

Last fall we looked at a short list of potential candidates and decided that the best match for our needs was an open source editor created by a team of developers led by Frederico Caldeira Knabben. The editor's name bears the initials of Mr. Knabben -- FCKeditor.

For the most part content authors should find the interface very similar. Most of the styling features are still there, but some of the toolbar buttons have changed icons. Our support team has prepared some introductory material to ease the transition for existing customers.

Some of the things that users will find as welcome additions:

cleaner HTML created by the editor
availability of Undo and Redo operations
support for keyboard shortcuts, making the editor feel more like a word processor than an HTML form

Some of the things we have improved with respect to our own editor customizations:

oversize images are re-sized on the server upon upload so that they fit within the typical width of a blog column, making page load times much faster
a keyword strength meter that doesn't slow down the editor on older systems and browsers

One thing that may jar long some time users is the change in the keyword strength meter itself. Although the red-to-green gradient remains, no longer does the editor sport a numerical score.

It was our experience that some users became too fixated on the score getting "stuck" at a certain value. The meter's algorithm was designed to balance the desire to include keywords against the need to ensure that they weren't used excessively in a post. When you blog for SEO, you have to keep these opposing goals in mind, lest your content look spammy in the eyes of search engines.

Rather than shooting for a "perfect score", an author should treat the meter as qualitative barometer of whether he or she is performing this balancing act well on a corporate blog. Moving from a number to a qualitative measure should help emphasize that.