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.
