This is my first ever post on my new site CtrlF5.me. Since the best time for me to write blog posts is going to be on the train to or from work, and since I find that I always have a very unreliable internet connection while travelling on the train to or from work, I thought I would try and find offline options for this WordPress blog. A quick search revealed that it is a built-in feature of MS Word 2007 and above! Awesome… my laptop has MS Word 2013 installed… too easy!

So I follow the steps found in the Microsoft article found here at the Office.com website. There are instructions for various other type of blogs such as Sharepoint, Community Server, WordPress etc. As I progress through the instructions it is so easy and I think this is perfect. I get up to the part to where I enter my blog URL and followed by my Username and Password.

I press OK and then get the following message:

Mmmm. When you think about it, the URL I have provided in the configuration is only an http:// URL so I shouldn’t be surprised.

The further I investigate this, I wonder if I can login to my free WordPress.com blog using SSL. By default, the login page does not bring up https:// or SSL protection.

So I try changing the http:// in the Address bar to https://. It works!

Ok, so let’s see if I can use SSL to publish from MS Word. I decide to use the same URL as what is in my Internet Explorer browser above. That is https://username.wordpress.com.

And… it works too! Publishing blog posts from MS Word will now protect my password and other information transferred with SSL encryption.

Lesson: Try any way you can find to always use SSL to protect your password!

Until next time!