After a year of beta, the highly anticipated desktop blogging tool from Microsoft is finally released. The insidious bugs that corrupt the blog draft that prevent submission, and the image processing that crashed the application seem to be resolved.
WYSIWYG editing  |
Powerful table function |
Windows Live Writer (WLW blog) is currently the best among the free blogging tools, and its features easily surpass those of commerical blogging editor.
Main highlights of this editor include:
- full-featured table function (Though it lacks a merge cell function, however, user can add this in HTML mode)
- WYSIWYG editing and previewing which are exclusive to the Writer. No more wasting time in submitting blog for previewing. Just edit the blog using the original style and formatting (Top image) from the Blog theme, and then issue Web Preview function (image below) to display the blog. This is a godsend because I can’t recall how many countless time I have to wait to preview result in hosting service.
- Direct import of video and image through copy and paste. Just copy Youtube and Google video URL and paste it into editing screen, and the video will appear. No more worrying that the video embedded code get removed in WordPress.
- Tag submission to popular web services.
- Direct image processing like rotation, contrast adjustment, resizing, and others
- Image margin adjustment, borders and text wrapping.
- Spelling checker, smiley support (through plug-in download)
- Map function ! (Don’t expect Google Map support though)
and lot more functions to describe here. WLW is one of those Microsoft’s innovation that is just awesome to use (I have been using it for months).
So why not just check it out ? Download here
I use it, too, and love it! For a great overview of other stuff coming from Windows Live, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmullinax/archive/2007/11/14/windows-live-where-it-s-at-where-it-s-going.aspx .
John, I like it too and it has become a indispensable tool for me.
[...] highly recommended that a desktop blogging tools like Windows Live Writer (WLW) for editing and adding Page. The desktop editor is more powerful and feature-packed than [...]
[...] Windows Live Writer explicitly supports Single Pagination through the Split Post function. [...]
[...] Microsoft Windows Live Writer I have to say it is a pleasure to use, and its amazing Web Preview have to be seen to believe. Really WYSIWYG editing !The only issue is it lack smiley support and has some ‘needless’ complexities like New Page/New Post (Why’s there two ?). A very powerful table editor make this the only tool needed for those blog that need table feature. It is the only blog editor I used so far that able to successfully submit a blog with embedded Youtube video without further messing the html code. However, sometimes, it takes a long time to submit blog to WordPress. Moreover, it change certain windows component which mess up setting, eg JPG file type no longer recognize by windows, instead ask me to select a program to open. It also seem to mess up WordPress structure. I suggest user wait for the final release rather than use the beta version. WLW is finally released in November and briefly review here [...]
I love Windows Live Writer! I just started using it a few weeks ago after it went to final release, and haven’t incurred any major problems.
A favorite feature is the ability to save draft posts to my computer while being able to see how the post will look once published to the blog. Previously, I drafted posts in Notepad but it was a very basic, no-frills production.
The only issue that I’ve experienced was related to inserting Tags directly into a post. I inserted them into an entry and published the entry to my blog. At that point I realized that I had inserted the “wrong” kind of tag (what I’d really wanted to do was add WordPress tags and I later found the Live Writer section to make this happen).
I edited the post in Live Writer and republished it, but had trouble adding a carriage return in the post’s first paragraph. When I looked at the HTML, I found that there were DIV tags inserted, probably when I inserted the Tags, that weren’t removed after I deleted those Tags. I fixed the issue in HTML and was able to add carriage returns to the post after that.
I chalk this one up to User Error, not Program Error, and my love for Live Writer remains.
lcmotorist, good to know that people appreciate WLW.
I have been using this for all my blog posts because of its strong table layout feature.
It’s not perfect but definitely good enough.
im having trouble downloading WLW from the site, link appears not to work. anyone know any other place i can download?
Download at http://download.live.com/writer .