I write to this blog using the BlogDesk [1] off-line editor. When I set up this blog I spent a LOT, and I do mean a LOT of time trying to find a good offline editor. The solution to that problem escapes me to this day. BlogDesk is simply the best of a pretty awful lot. In my simple mind, as a user and a programmer, writing to a blog should be as easy as sending an email. Anyway.
Today I started working on my 1kW generator test [2] post. When I finished it and tried to transmit it to my blog, I got this meaningless error:
[3]
The message’s “suspicion” was correct. It didn’t have anything to do with WININET.DLL.
First thing I did, naturally, was check for updates. I had the current version. The second thing I did was re-install BlogDesk. I figured that this was yet another instance of those mysterious data termites undermining Microsoft’s finest. No good.
My third try was to go to blogdesk [1] and look for a solution. I went to the forum and searched for “wininet.dll”. I found this page [4]. You may notice something strange there. It’s in German. Only a kraut would be arrogant enough to put up a German support page for an internationally used software package, a language spoken by what? 0.0000000000001% of the world’s population? *sigh*. Like it or not, English is the (near) universal language of the web.
Thankfully Google Translate did a good enough job that I could muddle through. There I found the answer which was something very non-obvious.
Internet Exploder (the Microsoft flagship virus transmission service that also happens to display web pages) was set to “offline mode”. Look under “file”, “work offline”.
Now I’d rather get castrated with dull scissors than start Exploder so I have no idea how it got set for offline work. Especially how it got set between my last blog entry and the one I was working on.
Seems to me this is something that BlogDesk should detect. Even better, it should set Exploder online during a transmission instead of generating that meaningless error message. Oh well.
At least now other BlogDesk users who experience this problem will have the solution presented to them in Plain English.
John