No copy, paste, but you can insert an image from the clipboard through a menu. Not as fast, but will work. And the first time i tried it, it didn’t work. The image is opened in an image editor where you can resize it. This again, isn’t without flaws. I opted to resize the image to 400px, so i entered 400, and tabbed out of the field. Nothing happened. So i started looking for a resize button. Nothing. Put my cursor in the size field again, entered 400, and pressed return. That works! You have to press enter. Very intuitive…

To upload to wordpress i had to configure ftp again. Seems like wordpress doesn’t support image upload.

So far i like live writer better.

I’ve looked at using a desktop blog editor before, but couldn’t find one which i liked. My main reason for using a blog client would be to avoid having to upload images. I just want to write a text, drag some images into the text and save it to my blog. I tried some clients but they all required me to upload images through some ftp window. Too much work. I want something which works like MS-Word. Paste an image into you text, resize and crop it in your document, and save it. No more external image programs required.

So far, Live Writer seems to be better already. I’ve just pasted a screenshot into this text and resized it. Cropping isn’t supported as far as i can tell. You can apply some effects to your image, like black and white and watermarking, but no cropping. Hope it ends up in the production release.

What about uploading? Let’s test…

Update: image upload is not seemless with wordpress. I had to enter ftp configuration details, like where to save the image. Also, i would think that a good image program would generate smaller images.

Conclusion: not bad, not great, but better than an html interface when adding a lot of images with a post.

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

This seems so wrong. Without google many sites would not exist. Many sites depend on google to deliver visitors, and they depend on google for income, through adsense. So how is google leeching on these sites?

But Jakob Nielsen isn’t talking about these sites. He’s talking about webstores that get customers through adwords. And his conclusion is that most of the profit of these webstores is going straight to google to pay for the adwords. He’s probably right about this.

His solution, improve customer loyalty, is correct, but misses in my opinion the most important ideas. He suggest to improve customer loyalty by using email newletters, request marketing, affiliate programs, news feeds. These are all good ideas, but i don’t think these will turn me in a loyal customer. The most important ideas are quality, customer satifaction and trust. If i’m happy after the first sale, i’ll probably come back for another. Why would i gamble with a new webstore if i’ve had a good experience with an earlier webstore?

Out of the box, JDeveloper has a lot more functionality than Eclipse in many areas. Visual JSP editing, visual support for JSF, support for some of the UML diagrams, wizard support for it’s ORM frameworks ADF Business components and Toplink. It’s a good IDE, so if you haven’t tried it yet, you should.

It’s good to see all the effort Oracle is putting into Java these days: EJB 3.0 support in OC4j since last year, BPEL plugin for JDeveloper, BPEL engine, a really good set of JSF components, a Toplink plugin for Spring, support for xdoclet in JDeveloper.

I’ve also written an Ant target for my current project where we execute pl/sql. The pl/sql queries domain values from some tables and outputs an xml document containing these domains. The problem with Ant’s sql task is that it doesn’t display the output created using dbms_output. So i’ve extended the SQLExec class, to copy all the output created using dbms_output to standard out. This is done in the printDbmsOutputResults method: