Windows Live Writer: Write Your Blog Posts Easily

Editing via Wordpress own build-in WYSIWYG editor can be frustrating at most time, especially with the lack of some essential features like spell checking and the lust for more advance image editing.

Last year Microsoft had released an interesting blog authoring tool known as Windows Live Writer (WLW) – Still in Beta atm. Originally geared towards Windows Live Spaces users, it also support other blog CMSs like Wordpress (yeah..), Movable Type, LiveJournal and Blogger.

I have never being fond of using blogging tools actually, Let see if WLM can change that.

Installation

This part was pretty much the same, WLM will request for your blog URL and login info and it automatically does the rest. Notification upon your blog detection will pop out and it will start to setup and download all the settings and necessities from your blog.
You might see a test post (see figure) since WLM need to check with your theme setting too. Just delete it once the process is finish.

First Impression

When I first launch it, I thought I mistakenly click on the MS word icon on my desktop…it resembles a lot only with simpler type of user interface. The usage was pretty simple and straight forward, really was a no brainer. Nothing much impressive here, lets look deeper into its core function.

Features

WYSIWYG Authoring

One of my favourite feature is the built-in WYSIWYG authoring that comes together with a real-time live preview of your post without even the need to save and load. This is certainly time efficient and bandwidth saving if you’re dealing with multiple editing at one time. There are a few type of preview that you can choose from the drop down list, includes web preview and HTML source-code editing.

You can specify category (see figure), change the timestamp, post status and almost anything else you want, just like in the web editor.
Similar to the web editor or more, WLM also have those regular quicktag like headings, fonts, margins, colors, background image, paragraph parsing and block quotes.

Photo Publishing

Photo publishing and editing with WLM does have it own advantages. Although I have no issue here, but a bit more customization compare to the bulky web editor would certainly add up the spice to my posting.

With WLM photo publishing feature, it make easy to insert custom and upload photos. You can even specify a thumbnail that links to a larger image elsewhere, modify size, text wrapping and graphic effect (like adding shadows…etc).

Map Publishing

I think this one is not really a crucial features to be consider here, unless your site deals with travel or direction related. Basically this features enable you to insert a windows live local map directly to your post without the need of third party plugin.

Writer SDK

WLM SDK allows developers to extend it capabilities to publish additional content types.

- Images for online publishing sites
- Embedded video or audio players
- Product thumbnails and/or links from e-commerce sites
- Tags from tagging servers

Definitely a neat features to add more functions to WLM.

What does differentiate Live Writer is that they’ve released an API that allows developers to extend the capabilities of the software to publish additional content types.

via Techcrunch

Compatibility

Originally WLM was developed to be a great client for windows live spaces but now it seems to support other type of famous weblog too like blogger, live journal, typepad and most importantly wordpress.

Bad news for Mac user though as WLM doesn’t support MacOS yet.

Overall

Overall, this is definitely a great tools to be consider especially for those heavy bloggers and with slow line connection. I find that it still lacks in some features compare to those establish one like w.bloggar and ecto for windows and macOS respectively. However, the available features should be enough to get you posting in a breeze.

Windows Live Writer has the features and capabilities of a program you would expect to see bundled in the next version of MS Office. I really think other companies can learn from this product – and they need to.

Via PaulStamatiou

If you have decided to give it a try, be sure to check out the available WLM plugins too.