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.

Getting started with R

Back in 2017-18, I started teaching a course in a business school – instead of including a lot of theoretical frameworks, I opted to go with the basics and some implementation and tooling concepts. One of the tools that I chose to teach was how to use R in business analytics.

For those of you who do not know R, here is a helpful wiki article on the same.

Teaching what is broadly a scripting language to graduate students who havent written a single line of code is a humbling experience. You cannot take concepts such as variables, control loops, libraries as taken for granted since the exposure to these has been minimal. So how does one pack all that information into simple, usable instructions?

This is what I did.

Use free MOOCs

For students to understand the basic concepts of R – vectors, assignments, matrix, simple functions, etc, I prefer free MOOC such as the Introduction to R by Datacamp. The course is simple, it has the R ide within the practice area and allows for easy practice sessions and a playground to test your scripts while you are reading through the course material. I find this super useful for application oriented courses.

Right before jumping into the actual concepts of how R can be used for business analysis, this basic introduction course helps in establish a good solid base for participants who want to get started with R.

Use multiple datasets

I typically start these sessions with a financial data set. Credit card usage statistics, or some such information. However, I realized that students do better if they are able to relate to the date. During the length of the course, I found that switching to a course such as movie data (and thanks to IMDB for opening up their database) or cricket data made a lot more sense. It became easier for the participants to apply conceptual learning on the data sets.

See and Do

We used to incorporate several practice sessions in the class. This included getting the basics, writing scripts and getting started with R.

Some of the easier ways are –

  1. Use the R-Studio IDE installer
  2. Use the Anaconda Navigator
  3. Use an online tool like Rdrr

Using Google Analytics to Power your Content Marketing Efforts

Content Velocity Experiment in Google Analytics

Almost all blogs / content based websites use some format of web analytics or the other. This post is for those folks who are running content focused sites and need cues from Google Analytics data on what to write.

Continue reading “Using Google Analytics to Power your Content Marketing Efforts”

Internet Marketing and Your Business

If you own a business, you may or may not know a lot about internet marketing. Internet marketing is an extremely important part of growing your business these days, yet too many business owners don’t realise how important. They think that by handing out a few business cards, they can grow their business and make more money. I’m afraid not! Read on to learn more about internet marketing and your business!

Continue reading “Internet Marketing and Your Business”

9 Blog Promotion Tactics [Infographic]

A picture is worth a thousand words. Not for a SEO professional though!

I love infographics. Not only are they a beautiful way of driving home a point, but also people remember the key takeaways from visual media much more as compared to text.

These are some interesting tips to promote your blog, and I have to say that I am guilty of not following all of them.

Continue reading “9 Blog Promotion Tactics [Infographic]”

Correctly using the Read More tag

Read More tag

As a blogger who has been writing for the past 5 years or so, I was always confused about the Read More tag. This is a tag that you will find in your WordPress editor besides the Toolbar Toggle button.

Why would one want to insert their content with this tag? Wouldn’t it fill up your blog content with such intermediate tags and break the reader’s flow? Let’s go find out how to correctly use the Read More tag.

Continue reading “Correctly using the Read More tag”

What is Rat DOTA?

DOTA can be an exciting game, where two teams clash against each other in order to take down the opponent’s Ancient Structure. Often at times, one team works exceptionally well in team fights – perhaps their combinations are better timed, or their heroes have synergies … or they are simply the better players. In which case, they keep winning team fights. This is where Rat DOTA comes into play.

Continue reading “What is Rat DOTA?”