Mr. Swann recently talked about the tools he uses for his weblogging workflow. Since most craftsman like talking about their tools, I thought I'd let the world know what's on my hard drive these days.

It all begins with the OS, and I just started using Windows Vista. Although I respect Mac OS X a lot and admire Steve Jobs, I've never liked fruit computers since my Atari & Amiga days. I can't bring myself to love a platform with only one mouse button. I've played with Ubuntu, and it's is (by far) my favorite Linux distribution. (I run Windows Server 2003 in the datacenter)

BTW, I'm on the verge of upgrading my Adobe software and I don't know if I want Creative Suite 3 Design Premium or Creative Suite 3 Web Premium. They both have the apps I really care about (Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, Flash, and Dreamweaver), and I suspect I'm more likely to use InDesign than all the web workflow stuff that the CS3 Web Suite has. Ugh, Adobe would have to emulate Microsoft's marketing (which makes upgrading software more confusing than it should be). If anybody has any nice things to say about the filler in Adobe's newest CS3 Web Suite, let me know, it might make my decision easier.

That last one will come as a shock. For blog posting, I agree that Microsoft Word has historically sucked as an HTML editor. In older versions of Word you can avoid most of the MSO XML namespace crud by saving the file as HTML 3.2 (which isn't the default behavior and adds to its' reputation as a lame HTML editor). However, a good craftsman never blames his tools. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Back in the old days (say 6 months ago), I would've used Windows Live Writer or the built-in editor that came with the blog. However, I feel I should mention Word 2007 is a much better tool for blog posting than previous versions. In fact, I'm using it to create this blog posting and it works with Subtext. So Mr. Cronin, there is no gum in my blog's hair, you just need to get some peanut butter.

Too bad peanut butter doesn't go with spam...