Windows Live Writer 2008 is Really Cool!
Recently when I started blogging I was looking for a decent blog editor that could support all the essential features that are required to be productive when writing a blog post but without being intrusive. I tried the WordPress integrated editor but was not comfortable with it. So I decided to look for an alternative on the Internet. I decided to try out the Windows Live Writer 2008 after seeing many good reviews about it.
I must say that I was impressed with the overall feature-set, in particular inline spell checker is very cool and after a little setup you are ready to publish your new creation on the blog. No need to login to your WordPress account and write posts there. Your usual set of commands for text editing, images and video insertion are all there. You can also insert maps in to your post though I have not tried this feature myself. A nice touch is that you can add drop shadow, watermark and image effects such as sepia when inserting an image in your post.There is also some good collection of plug-ins available in the Windows Live Gallery. I have downloaded some plug-ins myself from the website but was not able to check them out. I will let you people know if I found something interesting. Since I was using WordPress account, during the setup it was able to download the installed theme in my blog and that proved to be very useful because after writing a post I was able to preview its looks in live writer as it will look on my blog after publishing without actually uploading and publishing it to WordPress.
However there was an issue that I noticed after spending some time when I tried to publish my new post with it. That is there was not any tag field! to insert the tags related to my post. This is something that really depressed me because other than that I really liked this Microsoft offering. After some searching on the Internet I found excellent tip about adding tag field to live writer when using with WordPress on Digital Inspiration.Another minor issue I noticed is that because it is developed in .net so it does have some overhead as with any other .net based application.Overall, I would say that it is another impressive product from Microsoft after the release of Office 2007. Only thing to observe now will be that if they continue this trend to understand the requirements of the end-user before releasing a product. Only time will tell.
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I agree, we’ve been trying out various offline blog writers, and this gets my vote so far. My only complaint is the ugly code it uses. It’s like a sledgehammer!