Easy Blogging With Windows Live Writer
For the past few months, I have been using Windows Live Writer, a desktop blog publishing application, to write and publish my posts. This free utility encouraged me to abandon the awful WYSIWYG text editor of WordPress for writing my posts. Don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress as a blogging platform, but its HTML text editor sucks!
Windows Live Writer allows me to freely manage a post without being dependent on the browser. This means that I don’t need to be connected on the Internet to start writing a post. You can think of it as being a blog client to your blogging platform (WordPress, Blogger.com, etc.), the same way that Microsoft Outlook is an email client to various email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.). In other words…"Write As You Go!".
With Windows Live Writer, you can automatically save a post locally, come back to it later, check for grammar errors before publishing it, publish the post as a draft, edit a post, manage multiple blog accounts, add and remove plugins to facilitate some tasks, write your own plugins for it, etc. Talk about flexibility!
As stated by Wikipedia,
Windows Live Writer introduces the Provider Customization API that enables both rich customization of Windows Live Writer’s behavior as well as the opportunity to add new functionality to the product. Currently Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, and TypePad have all taken advantage of this API to expose additional service-specific features within Windows Live Writer.
Currently, Windows Live Writer is compatible with the following blogging platforms:
- Windows Live Spaces
- Blogger
- LiveJournal
- TypePad
- Wordpress
- All blogs that support RSD (Really Simple Discoverability)
- MetaWeblog API
- Moveable Type
- Community Server
Written in managed code, you can also use a tool like Reflector to view the internals of the application. This is incredible useful if you’re planning on developing plugins for it. On the subject of plugins, I am very impressed with the following ones:
Click here to see the whole list of currently available plugins.
There are of course some improvements and new features that could be implemented to make it better.
- For instance, whenever I insert a new table, I get to define its width in pixels only, NOT in percentage. What’s up with that? Is it a new ‘best practice’ to define a HTML Table’s width in pixels only?
- Another improvement could be to add an image toolbar so that we can edit the image on the fly (cropping it, adding shapes to it, etc.) whenever we insert one, pretty much like the Picture Tools ribbon in Office 2007. Resizing is fine, but not enough. For the moment, I have to copy an image to the clipboard, paste it in Paint.NET, edit it, then copy it again to the clipboard and finally paste it in Windows Live Writer. I should be able to do this from within the application, the same way any word processor software allows me to do.
- A last improvement could be to give me the possibility to choose the browser I’d like to view my posts in. Just because Internet Explorer is set as my default browser, that doesn’t make it my primary browser!
You can read more about it in the team’s blog.
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