Windows Live Writer

I’m testing out a new blogging tool today, by the name of Windows Live Writer. It is currently out in “Technical Preview” Fancy words for a beta release.  I don’t know if they plan to eventually charge for this program or not.

As some(one) of you knows I recently gave Flock another shot for blogging. Once again I found it to be a nice idea, but it wasn’t good enough to warrant the slower browser speeds and larger memory footprint when compared to firefox.

After using Flock’s build in blog writer I found myself going back to Blogger’s built in blog editor, which basically broke the whole browser for me, though I did like the media-bar feature in Flock…

BUT – that aside, I’m now giving this Microsoft attempt at blogging a shot, and I’m liking it as I type this post. It has three tabs for the writing pane – Edit, Preview, and Source. Edit is the standard WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that most of us have gotten used to (The equivalent of “Compose” tab in Blogger). Preview is a little unique in that instead of just previewing what the post will look like (and often being a little off if you’re in blogger) this program actually shows you the post ON YOUR BLOG without posting it, which is a nice little bit of magic in my opinion :)  Source is just what it says it is, the HTML code that makes up the post. I occasionally need access to this to fix things in my posts, so it’s important to have there.

You’ll notice at the top of this post there is a reflection of my screen-shot. My house is not flooded with calm, reflective water. No, this is another advantage Live Writer has over the Blogger editor. There are Photo effects! Little touches like this will spruce up your blog and make it look just that little bit nicer. Let’s take a quick run down of the Border Options.

Inherit from Weblog (Take the Blogger Defined Border):

Photopaper:

Rounded Corners:

This isn’t the best shot to be illustrating these borders with but it’s what I have on me as it were.

You can also Rotate, Crop, Adjust Contrast and tilt all from within the editor, along with the basic Black+White, Sepia, Gaussian Blur, etc. layers you’d expect to see.

These are the basic features I’ve come across just writing up this post, as well as all the basic ones (Tags, Set Publish Date, Save Draft online, Save Draft Locally)

I’d recommend my blogging friends give this one a shot, I’m liking it!

Windows Live Writer is a free download from Microsoft's Website.

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