The Perfect Blogging Tool
When the average blog writer thinks of a software company that is innovative and offers tremendous free products, Microsoft is not usually the first that springs to mind. In fact, I would venture to claim that Microsoft would never spring to mind.
All that can change now. I present Windows Live Writer. Claiming this piece of software is perfect may sound like a stretch, admittedly it probably is a bit of a stretch, but since I’ve been using it I’ve found lots of Pros and no Cons.
Windows Live Writer is part of the new Windows Live initiative. This includes several productivity products all of which seem to be pretty darn good at what they do. Live Writer is designed to be a blog posting tool capable of posting to the most popular blogging platforms. These include Spaces, SharePoint, Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, and others. I have personally used it to post to Blogger and Wordpress blogs without any issues whatsoever.
The feature that pops out at you the most is during the initial setup of Live Writer. When adding a Weblog to Live Writer for posting, the program asks for permission to auto detect your theme. This is a killer feature as it makes Live Writer a WYSIWYG editor for your blog. This is complete with background and text coloring. When it comes time to publish you’ll see that all of your previously used categories are available as well as tags and other advanced options. Inline images and video are also part of this experience.
Do you want to write html code into your post? You have that option. There are several view options including web preview which places your post right into a layout of your actual site. Writing posts is as easy as writing in any other word processor application. There is a toolbar for easy formatting and everything is intuitive and straight forward. A sidebar offers quick links to previous posts and drafts. This is where you will use another excellent extension of the program.
That extension is plug-ins. These plug-ins range from incorporating images directly from flickr, to streaming silverlight applications. The Plug-ins can be written by anyone with the desire to do so, this can lead to some being better than others. Pay attention to the comments of other users and you should be able to avoid the bad ones.
There is more to experience with this program but I encourage you to download and try it for yourself. Once you’ve had a chance to use it let me know how it works for you.
