Windows Live Writer

December 29, 2007

I think one of the things that stops me writing frequently in one of these sites is the number of hoops that must be jumped through in order to do it. Open a web browser, log into the blog, navigate through the admin pages and then the write-preview cycle until it’s done. With that in mind, I figured it might be easier to try writing it in an application, and synching it up to the blog. This is my trial run with Windows Live Writer.

Windows Live Writer is a pretty little tool, colourful and fits in nicely with all the other Windows Live products. It interfaces with WordPress well, and as I type this in the application, the editor pane is themed with the CSS styles directly from my site - a nice touch. There is however a preview view that shows you the post as it will appear in the blog without having to post it as a draft. You can save draft copies locally or store them as drafts on your website itself. It’s also providing a much needed, well for me anyway, spell-checker which I shall now liberally abuse.

The most important bits of meta information attached to a news post in WordPress, the categories, tags, slug etc can all be edited directly. Writer can retrieve all the posts from your blog so you can edit ones written previously elsewhere.

The Windows Live Gallery also holds many plugins for you to customise Writer. There are plugins for among other things, inserting syntax highlighted code, attaching files, or pasting what song you’re currently listening to (Ego - The Sounds (Dying To Say This To You) for reference ).

Overall, a very powerful tool that I could get to like a lot.

Filed under: Blog, Windows Live |