Microsoft Live writer
Revised: August 23, 2006Well never being one for not trying new things once stumbling across this Microsoft Live writer thing over at Version3Point1 I had to try it out. So I have downloaded the program from the live website and I must admit I didn't have very high expectations of it, I must say upon playing I am remarkably impressed!
So first things first the layout of the program. It has a nice feel to it, and doesn't impose itself upon you with a lot of buttons that your never going to use. I wasn't too sure if I would like it at first but having used it for a while now it feels natural. In editing mode you can have four view modes: Normal, Web Layout, Web Preview and HTML code for the pro's out there. I have to use the Normal View instead of the web layout for editing because my theme doesn't play well with this editor (not the editors fault just my flashy use of flash). When looking at the Web Preview mode it is perfect, I can see the post exactly how it would appear live on the website and it's a very good feature when you have long articles with complex formatting.
As for weblog compatibility it is awesome! When you first open the program it asks you if you want to set it up for Windows Live Blog or a third party blog. This was where I was thinking, "oh no, its not going to support everything", but I couldn't have been more wrong. All it asked for was my blog url and my username and password, it then scanned the website and identified it as a modified version of wordpress and set everything up perfect. Now of course there are features that it doesn't support but those aren't features that come built into wordpress such as the tags and other plugins that I have installed. A work around for this is to upload the post to your blog as a draft and then add the tags before publishing it using the blogs web based admin.
While looking around the net for other wordpress blogs that use this I did find that some people had, had problems. Not huge ones, just little niggles such as the following from V2.1:
Whilst you can set the alignment of pictures in Live Writer, this doesn’t seem to be implemented on the actual blog itself, so you’ll have to do a bit of tweaking of posting images and text together in a post if need be.
First impressions from the blogging community indicate that this tool has been well received, as not only is it free but Microsoft have done a damn good job with building it and thinking of its features. What really impresses me though is that they have thought about the blogging community as far as releasing a writer SDK so that the blogging plugin community can write plugins for Microsoft Live writer to include compatibility with their plugins. I can only see this as being a good thing and look forward to seeing a Wordpress plugin that brings full wordpress editing functionality to the Live Writer.
As it stands I do really like this editor, its clear that Microsoft have followed the KISS rule and made everything clean and easy to use. I also like the way that the editor uses standard html code which wont break my website and that it allows you to edit the code on the fly. Yes there are a few niggles, but that is understandable being that it is still in Beta and its designed primarily for Windows Live Spaces and I'm using it for Wordpress. All in all I must give Microsoft a huge clap as it is clear that a lot of effort has gone into this application and it has paid off.
You can find out more and download the application here.
Tagged: Blogging-Tool, Microsoft-Live-Writer, Tools, wordpress.
Mr. Carbon Twelve
