How to setup Microsoft Word to post to WordPress

For those bloggers who publish directly to WordPress, life has been good. Especially after the Gettysburg editor, users got a live site, rich text editor which just worked. The user experience is very much like the much loved Medium editor and for quite some time this was the default mode in which I used to publish. Not that I write frequently these days! In fact, this post is after an hiatus of more than a year! One pet peeve I have with the existing WordPress editor is that in the aim of making writing easy, a lot of the advanced options have been hidden. Somehow it ticks me off and I haven’t been able to write as much as I wanted to.

Perhaps it was writers block, or a busy schedule, or just being plain lazy. I have no excuses for this and in future will try and be much more regular. However, this post is not about my lack of writing, its about this cool feature that I recently found about in the MS Office suite. Microsoft Word has always been a major editor for most individuals (be it a student or a professional). Would it not be super cool if we can somehow directly publish to our blog from MS Word? Let’s find out how!

Step 1: Create a new document

Open your MS Word (as long as its higher than version 2007), and search for a new document type – blog post. You will find this in templates and more if you haven’t earlier done this. Once you find the template, you will notice that there is a Create button.

When you set this up, Office will prompt you to setup your blog. Click on Register Now. This is where its going to get a bit technical, but don’t panic.

Step 2: Register your blog

In this list, choose WordPress. Now, you need to know the URL of your self-hosted or WordPress.com website as well the username and password that you use.

Add these details and make sure to click the Remember Password, else every time you try to publish to your WordPress site, you will be asked to key in the password.

Step 3: Write a draft

You are now done! Start writing your blog post, and once you are done, hit publish!

The post would then be submitted to your WordPress site with your credentials. That’s all there is to it.

The new office!

The New office
The New office
The New office

We recently shifted our office to Sakinaka to a larger, much open space. Shifting to a commercial property has its charms, and it has its overheads as well.

This office will see us through for atleast the next couple of years, and hopefully we will be forced to move on to a much larger space after that!

Yes, the cake was our own celebrations on having finished the furnishing of the office.

Corrupt Administration!

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. – Plato

In an earlier post where I was complaining about the lack of revolutionaries in the system, little did I know that in a few days I would be experiencing the wisdom of Plato first hand.

We are in the process of shifting our offices from Goregaon to Andheri. The office is within 2km of my home, and pretty much what you call my locality. Due to my efforts in securing kindergarten admission for my daughter, I have also come in touch with our local administration.

Now, the person in charge of the sprucing up of the new office did not do his homework, and started the interior decoration of the office without any checks with the local authorities. Three months down the construction, when we have shifted into a makeshift office (its going to be our computer lab in the new office), and have no other alternative offices to go to, the local authorities intervened and stopped the construction.

Upon enquiry, we found out that a permission needs to be taken from the Buildings and Industries department of the Bruhanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Without this said permission, construction cannot go on.

Since the BMC officials refuse to parlay with “north-Indians” and they are from the Shiv Sena party, guess who has to liaison between the organization and the BMC :)

When I went to the officials, I was made to wait indefinitely biding for my time to come. Fortunately, I knew someone higher up in their chain of command and not wanting to play the waiting game, I made the required calls, and got to meet the concerned person.

I do not know whether it was my fortune or misfortune, but the person with whom I had clout in the administration was also the source of my predicament! It was his department that had raised the issue and was waiting for my organization to respond.

So began the diplomatic dance. The dance where you avoid saying the obvious and stick to the unsaid protocol. All said and done, I was presented with two choices – one, the way of the right, wherein we would have to chase this permission across the city for 3-6 months. The other, the way of the corrupt, wherein we have to pay for silencing the officials.

The sum mentioned was in the right range … I don’t know how these officials do it, but someone needs to learn pricing from them. The amount was not too high for us to outright say no, it was lower than the opportunity cost of keeping our employees at their homes :), and yet it was high enough to grease the right palms and keep their pockets filled.

We are PWN’ed and most likely will give in to their demands. The price of sheer negligence on one senior partner’s part is a 2 lakh bribe. Talking about corruption is one thing, but when the efforts to fight the system means you will lose more than what you will save, then does it make sense to fight it? We would be writing it off this year.