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I’m a new convert to Microsoft’s new blog authoring tool - Windows Live Writer beta. The mission as quoted from their site:

Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone.

Live Writer is built on the .net platform and while geared for their Web2.0 Live hype and targeting users of MySpaces (now Live Spaces), Live Writer surprisingly supports blog CMSs like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc. In fact, the WordPress admin panel’s ability to save drafts online and preview how it looks on your blog’s visual theme style is mimic perfectly in the MS Word-like environment of Live Writer.

 

The download (the file weights a mere 4.8mb) and installation was a breeze. Initial setup was done via a wizard upon first launch. You get a LiveSpace or Others option – give it your site URL, username & password and Live Writer contacts the site and performs all the necessary authentication and sync. It then presents you with a MS Words 2003-type blank page and lets you type away. Anyone who has ever worked on a text editor will immediately have an intuitive feel of where to look for the various controls. Great start!

 

Features

Figure: New Post

 

As to it’s WYSIWYG (we all know how notorious WYSIWY[normally don't]G editors are like) capabilities, it’s surprisingly accurate, as Live Writer seems to knows the styles of my blog such as headings, fonts, colors, background, spacing, margins and block quotes is as true to life as editing in the Wordpress admin panel. It seems that Live Writer downloads your blog’s CSS and recreated a virtual version of your site so you can blog within it. It read the customized styles of my Wordpress blog right and with the option of Web Layout  (shows you how your post will look like within the borders of the blog sidebars) and Web Preview (shows you how your post will look in relation to your blog theme, headers and even other previous posts). You can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it. It also has a Normal and HTML Code view.

 

Figure: Web layout view.

 

Figure: Web preview view

 

Live Writer handles photo’s fairly well and sends local images you paste into your post to the server to be published at the same time you hit that button. It also lets you do some simple image editing and effects. such as adding watermarks, drop shadow, adjusting contrast and brightness, sharpening & blurring, emboss and resizing. 

 

Figure:Image manipulation

 

The Properties and Trackbacks bar at the bottom lets you adjust the time stamp and comments, URL links, trackbacks and add keywords to the post. I could also select which categories to organize the post according to which categories my blog had. A unique features of Live Writer is it allows you to inserting maps from Windows Live Local. 

 

Naturally as an offline blog editor, your post are saved on the local machine, but you can click the drop-down for Publish and there’s an option to send  the draft to your blog in case you’d want to continue blogging from another computer. Checking the Tools | Preferences, I found more features like automatically save drafts at interval of choice, automatically check spelling before publishing, etc. A curiosity though, is the Plugins options, which empty and hints of more functionality via plugins in the works.

 

Fast Blog Switching

Another good thing i’d like to highlight is the ability to seamlessly switch between blogs. This are for those bloggers who maintain more than one blog or who are affiliate co-authors at another blog. The top right hand corner where your blog’s name is displayed is actually a drop down box and enables you to quickly switch between blogs without loss of features. (It’ll even setup the virtual version of your 2nd blog).

 

Beta Bugs

Before anyone accuses me of being a MS fanboy due to all the praise I’ve been singing of Live Writer, it’s time to examine it’s bugs and quirks. Yes, it’s still in beta so these are expected. It’s crashed on me once before complaining about illegal operation and termination means lost posts (up till point of save that is) and wanting to send an error report to MS. There minor error nag screen when handling images (the error screen is dismissible with a Continue option though and it doesn’t seem to affect anything). There’s no way to delete published posts. The <!- -more- -> tag doesn’t work as anything after it can’t be displayed. The interface is not tabbed (expected, as MS isn’t big on tabbed apps) so if you hit a New Post another instance of Live Writer will be launched. Good as the built-in image manipulation is, the images sometimes come up blurry.

 

Direction & Conclusion

This is one of those rare moments where MS might have actually got things right. Windows Live Writer is a small program with big features and capabilities that one would expect to be bundled with Windows Vista as one of it’s accessories on the Live get connected theme or MS Office 2007.  Right now, while it’s free, I’ll definitely continue to use and enjoy it.

 

Download here.