September 3, 2009

OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Word for WordPress blogging — a 65:1 ratio in cruft

I prepare most of my blog posts in OpenOffice. Most of the rest I write directly online in WordPress. I almost never use Microsoft Word.

The reason, simply put, is cruft.

When I copy a post from OpenOffice to WordPress, I invariably get a line at the top that looks like

<!–         @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in }         P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }     –>

I delete that, which according to OpenOffice stats amounts to exactly 100 characters; I fiddle with the bullet points a bit; I add a title, categories, and a MORE separator; and I’m basically good to go.

By way of contrast, in a recent post I copied a sentence from a press release I’d recieved across Google Mail in .DOC format, forgetting to stage it into OpenOffice first.  The cruft I needed to delete consisted of 6489 characters, namely: Read more

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