Windows Live Writer
I had read some good stuff over at Lifehacker about Windows Live Writer. I’ve avoided Windows Live like the plague, seeing it at mostly a bad attempt at consolidating web services into one badly designed package. After reading about Live Writer, I thought I’d give it a try.
Installation was smooth, and the program itself is fairly minimalist. Inserting the screen shot to the left was very easy. As a side note, I really wish I had a working function of automatically uploading a picture from my computer to my host for insertion into my blog. That particular WordPress function has been buggy.
Looking at the features ready at hand, I see that I can easily insert a table and a map. In addition to what comes with Live Writer, there are various plug-ins that I will likely be experimenting with, some of which may actually be a solution for the image upload problem I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
One thing I am enjoying is the strict spell check within Live Writer. Even though Firefox has a spell check built into the browser, I find it to be lax in catching many of my frequent errors.
I just noticed that Live Writer is using my current blog design to show me almost exactly how this post will appear on my blog. I must admit, that’s pretty cool.
Live Writer allows me to set categories and keywords, and even pulls in the categories I’ve set up for my blog. Unfortunately, the program does not pull up previous keywords. If anyone at Microsoft is listening, this is a feature I’d love to have!
Wendy Boswell at Lifehacker called Live Writer "slick" (emphases not added). I agree with her. While I’m not sure I’ll use Live Writer for all my blogging needs, I’m impressed how how connected the software is to my blog settings. I don’t think I’d be wrong in suggesting that Live Writer may be the best blogging software available.
6 responses so far
Positing this blog entry with Live Writer was a breeze. Impressive.
I am glad using Windows Live Writer was a breeze for you!
Let me assure you, we are listening. We really really want to add keyword/tag synchronization like we have with categories. Thank you for giving your feedback to reassure us that our users want this feature.
If you have any more feedback or questions feel free to email me.
For the images, just click on Insert> Picture (in the toolbar, at the top), choose a picture, and insert it. In the right sidebar you will have a nice selection of picture borders, full control of size, borders, etc, and even the ability to tilt the image.
Brandon,
Thanks for commenting. Glad Microsoft is listening. Are articles posted through Live Writer sent through Microsoft servers, or scanned by them in some way?
Kip,
Thanks, I’ll try it out. I just wonder where the images upload to.
@Joel
No, they never go to any Microsoft servers if you are using a blogging service other then Windows Live Spaces(like Wordpress, Blogger, etc…). But your posts are indexed by Google, which is how I found your post if you were wondering.
If you do like Writer, I sugguest you check out our new version(beta) http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D85741BB5E0BE8AA!1533.entry
-Brandon Turner
@Joel
No, we don’t send your posts to our servers or scan them in anyway. But we do use blog searches to find feedback for our product because it matters a lot to us.
Also, if you are interested, there is a beta version of WLW available:
http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D85741BB5E0BE8AA!1533.entry