For those who blog rather often and work within the Windows platform there is a new kid on the block. Windows Live Writer Beta is one of the latest Live tools to come out of Redmond in response to the growing web market.
Live Writer has been surprising many as a powerful and pretty complete blog engine. With the ability to view live previews, edit images and videos, handle multiple blog formats, and more, Microsoft’s new tool is a welcome addition.
I have been using Windows Live Writer for a few weeks now for my own blogs and wanted to share a little of that experience. I won’t get into every little aspect mainly because I haven’t put it through its paces enough yet. I have successfully used WLW with WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad with exceptional results. The ability to view live previews of my site while editing my post is a great asset in seeing how the final will fit with images.
As you can see I can easily switch to a live preview and see how my post will fit within my current blog as published. Another features that impressed me were the ability to save a draft to your blog quickly so you can pick it up later from any computer to finish. Windows Live Writer is listed as compatible with multiple blog services such as Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, and Community Server. Other services are easily added through a connection wizard which asks for login information, blog location, and proxy information. I found Movable Type was buggy but that seemed to stem from a permissions issue within Movable Type, not Live Writer.
There are quite a few plugins available for Windows Live Writer so far such as multiple video additions, live maps, tags and more. I can easily see this growing as time goes on to include just about everything a blogger might need. Of course since this software is still in beta form there are a few limitations yet. There is no easy way to work on multiple posts yet and the preview engine is based on Internet Explorer (of course) so your blog must view correctly on that engine. As more plugins become available though I expect we will see this change or multiply.
If you are using Windows and blog I highly recommend installing Windows Live Writer Beta and giving it a whirl.
October 26th, 2007 at 9:26 am
That is actually great. I happen to work with in three platforms and keep bouncing from one to another .My HP / Compaq laptop is vista and i use that quite often.By a nice addition to it.
Thanks for the tip.
October 26th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
I use this program all the time now and keep finding new features. I am very impressed with some of the offerings in Microsoft’s Live suite but this one is the best so far.