Opera Ergonomics

SPAW Editor is a web based in-browser WYSIWYG editor control enabling web site developers to replace a standard textarea html control with full-featured, fully customizable, multilingual, skinable web based WYSIWYG editor. Version 2 adds tabbed multi-document interface, floating/shared toolbars, modular architecture and many other exciting features.

I found this as I was searching around for some sort of graphical shell for M2's compose window... if such a beast exists. I thought that this might be it. I'm still not really sure how you use this - although they do say it works under Opera 9.x.

I found a piece in the OperaWiki about textarea editors, and how they could be the solution to formatting text in M2, but there's a pretty good overview of just what is available right now in this post.

I've been looking into the possibilities of sending pre-formatted e-mails to my blogs - and I've succeeded, up to a point. I've also tweaked my menu file so that I can right click a page, or text and send either the page url or the selected text to an e-mail. This is actually an existing Opera feature but I tweaked things so that I have a few popup options of where the e-mail is to be addressed to. This means that I find a page which interests me I can simply highlight whatever brief description they have on their main page, then right click the page and send it to my blog. Actually, that's exactly what I did with this post which is being composed and posted entirely within the Opera Suite.

The beauty about using M2 is that you can start a message and easily expand it/save it/come back to it in a few days, if you want. Or, you can post a link and description of any site to your blog in around 4-6 easy mouse movements. FOUR TO SIX easy mouse movements to capture information - that's like being able to photograph a site and have it appear on your blog almost immediately. That's a pretty neat thing to be able to do. The only thing I haven't quite worked out is how to get both the page link and the selected text to appear in the e-mail compose window... but I'm working on it. Right now I have to copy the selected text and paste it into the body of the e-mail which appears after I choose which blog I want to post on under "Send link to blog..." but, more often than not, I'll spend a short time adding more content and pictures (oh yes, you can attach your own pictures to the e-mail too) to blog posts anyway, so pasting a bit of text which is sat on my clipboard isn't too much of a hardship.

Now, imagine if the installation process for Opera included a check to see if you were a member of MyOpera and, if you weren't, you were given the option of doing so. Maybe Opera could (conceivably) create some sort of mail account for that user so that they could just wrong click on a page and start posting page links etc. to their new blog. Opera could include a default "received" mail in every new installation containing simple instructions on how to post messages. Nothing could be simpler than right clicking on a page, selecting "Send link to blog..." and hitting the "Send" button.

In my day job I work in the construction industry and, quite frequently I need to scour the web for materials and manufacturers, trade directories, useful software, hazardous materials data sheets, publications, specifications etc. etc. I'm sure most other people do the same - be it jam doughnut recipes or chimney sweeps. The potential uses of such a manner of info-blogging almost defy description. Whilst I'm sure that such a method of saving information is not new (the phrase Blogmarks sprang to mind as I was writing this), it seems to me that Opera, with it's built in client and amazingly well ordered, subscribed and supported blogging community offers a "one-stop shop" approach which is uniquely disposed to get a lot of mileage out of this advantage. I certainly know a few people who would be interested in saving information as easily as this. Bookmarks could be a thing of the past when you have an online cardfile system of sorts. "O-marks"? Anyone??

Dear Opera , I know I'm not supposed to go around editing my ini files as much as this (if at all) but you made them that way. I blame YOU! Incidentally, it all works... wonderfully well;)