PE4 - Adobe Contribute CS5 - Blog Manager Software

I haven't done much with the Adobe CS5 Suite so this week I thought I would dig around and see if I could find any lesser known useful Adobe tools.  Currently at FSO, we use the Apple iWeb application for managing our AR website.  Adobe Contribute is similar to iWeb and is designed for for managing blog sites like Blogger where you are currently reading this blog post.  Adobe Contribute can even replace iWeb.

To begin I started up Adobe Contribute CS5 and created a new "Blog Connection"

Adobe Contribute Creating a New Blog Connection

Adobe Contribute is a generic blogging tool so I specified that I would be connecting to Blogger. Adobe Contribute can also connect to WordPress, Mobile Me, and TypePad.

Connecting to a Blogger Blog

So far so good.. I entered my username and password and successfully connected to my Blogger blog site. Next, I tried to pull up an existing blog page (BP11) where I would make a simple change.  It took Blogger nearly 60 seconds to retrieve and display the page.  This slow response was perplexing so  I performed a quick check of the machine and Internet connection and everything seemed nominal.  To make sure this wasn't a anomaly I tried the same process again with the same slow results.

Editing a Blogger Blog with Adobe Contribute

After making a few simple edits to an existing page (BP11) for test purposes I decided to publish my changes back to Blogger and received this perplexing error message.  How could the images, audio, or video files not be unsupported?  I didn't add any audio, video, or images to my post and simply added a few lines of text.  Bravely I clicked "OK" to find out what would happen next.

Warning Message when Publishing a Change in Adobe Contribute

This is where things started to get even worse.  For some reason this edit created two RSS Feed updates with the subject of "##TITLE##" and the content of "##CONTENT##".

Strange RSS Feed Messages Generated by Adobe Contribute Publishing

Thankfully, these strange entries do not appear on my main Blogger page so this must be something internal to the process which Adobe Contribute uses to update pages.  This is where I decided to stop my exploration before something really bad happened and destroyed my Blogger site or corrupted the RSS feeds of my followers.

Before admitting defeat, I did a quick check for software updates and none are currently available for Adobe Contribute.  This tool has ample training material available in Lynda.com so I reviewed the blogging videos just to see if I made a misstep. Unfortunately, I could not find anything that I had done incorrectly. I was really looking forward to a good experience using Adobe Contribute CS5  so that I could work-offline and have an application to manage my blogs. Unfortunately the simplest of tasks are slow and produce warning messages and strange RSS feed messages.

If anyone of my followers is using Adobe Contribute CS5, I would like to hear from you and learn if I am using the tool incorrectly or if this behavior is normal.  In any case, this post was written with the editor on the blogger website and not Adobe Contribute CS5.

A wise philosopher once said, "It is better to learn from the mistakes of others since you may not live long enough to make them all yourself."