Blogger ate my homework

I just posted a lengthy post about social networking, only to be told that "a security token" error prevented my request from being fulfilled. Of, course, hitting the back button did not get me back to my text. I was happily using the Word add-in for Blogger until it was absorbed into the Google Borg, to avoid just this sort of thing.

ARRRRG!

When such things happen, I have learned to say, "Surely I'm not the only person who has this problem. Surely someone else has solved this problem." And so I went poking around for an updated Blogger add-in. It turns out there is a new Word integration . . . for Office 2007. Of course the Microsoft geeks (who are big blog users) will jump in to add value to the latest version of Office. And just as surely, they have absolutely no vested interest in supporting anything earlier than that. And the Google engineers dare not build such a thing themselves, lest they anger their partner in what must be a touchy relationship anyway. (In case you've been under a rock for the last five years, since Google inherited the earth, Microsoft and Google are the bitterest of foes.)

And, ironically, there is a glimmer of geek excitement in me when I think: Hey, I could build one! I started looking at the API documentation, visions of functions and interfaces dancing in my head, when I have to slap myself and come back to reality. Of all the things I could possibly do in my "free" time, writing software for the greater glory of Google is not one of them.