Windows Live Writer

Dec 09

JohnE/N blog authoring, review, windows live, writer View Comments

So for a while I’ve noticed this program come up when I search the Start menu for “Writer” to get to the Open Office word processor and I thought it was just some kind or text editing program. Turns out it’s a blog authoring tool.

So I’m giving it a quick trial. You can add photos and videos using it but I’m a bit wary of doing that as they won’t be stored in the gallery that I’ve had installed for years on my blog.

DSC_0071-pola

Wow, I like the border options for images. You can use the default blog border, add a drop shadow (as I have), add a polaroid effect, reflection or standard black borders.

I thought this might be a bit limited compared to the wordpress control panel (for writing) but it’s got a pretty full feature set.

The writing experience is quite nice, it’s displaying my background image behind the text input area, sans sidebar and header. However, you can switch to a ‘preview’ view of the full blog and also see the source code for the entry.

It has all the usual text formatting options and you can insert tables, image, photo albums, bing maps (no google, boo), tags and videos with the ability to add plug-ins for extra functionality. I’ve just installed a ‘facebook photos’ one but it doesn’t appear to be working.

Also, when you highlight text it un-highlights itself as soon as you let go of the mouse button which is annoying to say the least.

I think I’ll be using this quite a bit from now on. If I could integrate my gallery into it and get my video/audio flash players on here it would be perfect. I can probably use the wordpress plugin tags to get them in but that requires learning them off by heart. I may look into making my own WLW plugin.

Oh well, this is quite a nice little tool.

Ooh, the video uploader/inserter is quite nice so I’ll leave you with this: