And I can safely say that this looks pretty darned good! For people on the run (with laptops) this will make managing your blog a whole lot easier. Write your post offline, then simply publish once you’ve found Wi-Fi access!

See! Here’s where I’m posting from now.

Microsoft has released a new product beta called Windows Live Writer.  It offers rich-text, WYSIWYG creation of blog posts and interfaces with most major blog offerings, by the look of things – including WordPress and Blogger.  It looks like it has some interesting features too, such as seamless image uploading.

This is the latest in a number of applications that assist with posting to blogs.  BlogDesk is another example of such an application.  It has the advantage of having been around for quite a while (i.e. not beta).  It also supports a number of blog engines and has many of the same WYSIWYG capabilities.

The point is that this kind of application broadens the possible blogging audience.  This is of special interest to those of us in the Church where, oftentimes, the people who we’d like to publish to a blog are…shall we say, less than technical?  Give them a rich interface that has things that they’re used to in their word processor (i.e. spell checking) and all of a sudden you can have a priest blogging like a pro.

What’s more, they’re all free!  Definitely worth checking out.

I don’t know if you’ve already seen myCatholic.com but, if you haven’t, I suggest you check it out.  It’s a nice, clean, fast-loading aggregation site designed to be used as a homepage.  Very simple idea that has been well executed.  Good stuff I say!

Does such a thing exist?  I’m not asking if the Internet proper is entirely Catholic or even in line with Church teaching, since the answer to such questions would quite obviously be “no”.  If it was “yes”, it wouldn’t be the Internet, would it?

No, I am referring to sites on the ‘net that are Catholic in content or origin.  This “Catholic Internet” consists of an increasing selection of pages that really could have a .catholic TLD (if it were allowed).

If we were to look at the state of this Internet, overall I’d have to give an A for effort but a D- for execution.  The overall quality of the majority of these pages is pretty lacking.  This is to be expected – most Church organisations run a little thin when it comes to finances and it is usually expected that professional web presences are too expensive for the Church.

This is one of the myths that I hope this blog and its community will be able to expose.  There are a number of resources out there – tricks of the trade if you will – that we, as Catholic geeks, can take and make that drab old parish website a lot more 21st century.

There are also sites which are exceptions to this rule.  I’d also like to use this blog to point some of them out to you all, to spread the good news of the internet – that all is not lost! 

We’ll also be calling out to you to contribute in this search.  Let us know through the contact page, comments or by linking to us to show us what good content is out there.

Off we go!