The last few posts this week have been posted through Windows Live Writer, a free Microsoft (you hear me!) app designed to make blogging user friendly.
There are quite a few features I enjoy about this program:
- It allows editing using your site’s styling. It is a TRUE WYSISWYG blog post editor.
- It integrates pretty much seamlessly with my blogging platform and thus far I have had no issues with posts.
- The quick-linking feature is very useful. It is similar to the Auto-correct feature in Word, except that at publishing time it parses your post for key words and phrases and transforms them into predefined links.
- The availability of plug-ins opens this app up to the creativity of the masses.
There are a few downsides though:
- Can’t access posts made before WLW – it seems I can only edit posts that I have made through WLW and not before that. Also when I try to edit a page I get an error.
- It seems to use a lot of system resources – when I first open it, it takes quite a while to load and display. In terms of memory usage, it is just below Word.
- No Google Maps – or at least not that I have found. While the Insert Map function is very nice, it uses Microsoft’s Windows Live Maps. I frequently use Google Maps and it would be nice to have the option to insert a map from the UI.
I have yet to use Word 2007 as a blogging tool so I can’t compare the two right now. When I get a but more time (read: when school finally dies down a bit) I’ll post about Word’s blogging capabilities.
Overall I enjoy using Windows Live Writer for my blog posts and I will continue to do so.
