Le Danois

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Windows Live Writer review

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application for authoring weblog posts. Contrary to what one might expect, the Windows Live Writer application also work with non-Microsoft blog platforms, such as Blogger which I'm using.

Look and feel

First impressions is that the interface is nice and simple. During installation it read my stylesheet and created a local copy if my weblog template, so that I can get a true preview of my posts. Since it knows my stylesheet it can also give me an authoring view that lets me write my posts in a format that is exactly like it'll be once posted. It gives me a good idea of line length, etc. That's true WYSIWYG for ya.

Maps

The map feature is (sadly to say) once again a US only feature. Actually that is not one hundred percent true, since I did manage to insert an aerial photo of Toulouse. The closest zoom I could get to was however a general aerial view of Toulouse, which cannot be used for directions, and "road" view are not even available for my neck of the woods.

Images

Since you see the posts exactly as they will appear once posted, you can get a real impression of how your post's text will be aligned with the image. Cool stuff - or at least that's what I thought! It turns out that the image posting feature doesn't work for my blog platform of choice.

Update: I just tried the image upload towards Wordpress and there it works fine.

Plugins

The tool allows the creation of plugin which is a great move. I installed the Tag4Writer plugin which works great.

Conclusion

The Windows Live Writer is a very well done tool for blogging to blog platforms that are supported by the tool. The lack of image posting to Blogger does however disqualify it as a tool that bloggers such as myself would use. Too bad, since it seems very nice to use.

Tool download

Download the tool from the product weblog

tags: windowslivewriter, bloggertools, blogger

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