Windows 7: Blessing In-Disguise For Tech Bloggers

A lot of times tech bloggers need to review a software or write a tech tutorial where they need to take a lot of screen shots, then edit them, watermark them. We all know how cumbersome it can be. Well, Windows 7 will help you create such posts with ease & in probably less than half the time. Though it has it’s drawbacks. So what’s this magic tool in Windows 7 you ask?

It’s the known – Problem Steps Recorder! Yes. Say you want to write a tutorial on how to multiply 0 with 0, all you need to do is:

1. Start PSR
2. Open Calculator & perform the calculation.
3. Save the recorder’s output & extract the MHTML file.
4. Open it in MS Word 2007.
5. Remove the unwanted text
6. Copy-paste the rest in Windows Live Writer.
7. Format the article as wanted.
8. Change the image URLs to “Source picture”.
9. Give the title, tags, categories, excerpt etc.
10. Publish.

That’s it! You get screen shots with highlights of where you clicked!

Don’t believe me, here is a blog post I created out of a PSR file uploaded by Long Zheng on his blog. Hope he won’t mind. The draw back of this method from what i see is that there will be some extra code which you could’ve done without & formatting might be a bit tricky in some cases.