One of the main reasons I stopped updating my blog on a regular basis last year was due to the absence of a truly good stand-alone application that I could use to craft my posts in. There were several decent tools out there for managing blogs, but any of the ones with full feature sets were shareware tools, and I didn't think I blogged enough to justify spending any money on it. Sounds cheap, I know, but what can I say?
Fast forward to early this week when I read that Windows had finally released its full suite of "Windows Live" enabled applications. I noticed an app in the list I hadn't seen before called Windows Live Writer and when I began to dig for the details, I was seriously impressed. And so starts the review proper:
Windows Live Writer is a full-featured, stand-alone Weblog authoring/management tool that gives the user an incredible amount of flexibility and control over a number of aspects of their blog. And more than that, it gives them a single point of control for all of their different blogs, whether it be multiple blogs on the same provider, or someone who has multiple different blogs spread over multiple blogging providers. Now while I'm sure the tool was designed to be of premium compatibility with Microsoft's own blogging sight, Windows Live Spaces, it is fully functional with several of the big players on the blogging field including Blogger, TypePad and more, even your own privately hosted blogs. Obviously, the extent of my review will be limited to its interaction with Blogger, so as always, your mileage may vary!
The app, even on Windows XP machines (That's right! Its not just a toy for Vista users!) has a very Vista-y feel to it. The interface is shiny, clean and surprisingly easy to decipher and use.
It also provides a true WYSIWYG experience for the author that rivals any word processor out there, including Microsoft Word. Inline spell-checking is on by default, so no more obvious typos. But it still can't double-check your logic and context, so if you use "set" instead of "sit" well that's just too bad. You can insert Pictures, Hyperlinks, Tables, Image Maps, Tags (for services like Technorati or digg) and even video. And as if that wasn't enough the feature set is full extensible by way of third-party plug-ins. So all you home brew developers out there can fire up Visual Studio.NET and create some neat new features for everyone to use and enjoy. There's already a surprisingly vast list of extensions available on Microsoft's Windows Live Gallery, which is directly accessible from inside the program.
For those of you old-school bloggers out there, you can open up your draft posts in the raw HTML format and throw in whatever code is needed to achieve your desired effect. And for those posts that take a long time to piece together (like this review!) you can save posts as drafts and come back to them later.
But wait! You ask, "But A.I. Sure I can insert pictures in my post, but don't I have to upload them to Picasa or Flickr first so that I can link it as a URL?" And I say to you, "Nay. Windows Live Writer has got your back." Inserting a picture brings in a configurable property window that lets you adjust the size of the pic on the page, and a host of visual effects, and as if that wasn't enough, it uploads the photos to the appropriate repository for you automagically and references them in the post. Since I use Picasa and Blogger, Windows Live Writer created a new private album for me on Picasa and is uploading the images there first. Pretty dang slick, I say.
With Window's Live Writer, Microsoft has demonstrated, quite surprisingly to me, that they have a sturdy finger on the pulse of what blog author's need and I hope that they continue to expand this tool in the same positive direction as its started off in.
Windows Live Writer - Microsoft Corp.
Part of the Windows Live Suite - Available for download here.
Rating: 5 stars out of 5
