Smooth blogging using Windows Live Writer
For the past couple of months, I have been writing and posting blog entries using Windows Live Writer (WLW). I have tried other blog editors in the past, but WLW is the only one that I have kept.
I am posting this plug/heads-up because I discovered and installed a recently released upgrade of WLW(Beta 2) today.
Keep reading and I will plug WLW some more by letting you know why I think it is really useful.
I have been using WLW with both blogger.com and my own WordPress installations (including the one you are currently reading). The WLW Beta 2 version supports even more blogging platform specific features than its predecessor. For instance the WordPress <!–more–> tag.
So, here are 6 reasons why I really like Windows Live Writer:
- WLW produces really neat HTML (e.g. proper <P> paragraphs instead of <BR> galore) and it supports editing HTML directly.
- WLW is really great at publishing entries on blogs - e.g. it is possible to post entries as drafts and categories can be imported from a blog. The new Beta 2 introduces lots of improvements in this respect.
- There is a decent list of available plugins, which for instance enables me to insert various media in a clean-cut way.
- I can post to, and manage, several blogs.
- WLW can be configured to upload inserted images to a FTP-server and generate the appropriate links within the blog entry.
- It is really easy to fetch and update already published entries.
The only glitch I have come across concerns the spell checker, which has somehow disappeared in Beta 2. Apparently, it has something to do with the language settings on your Windows system (I think WLW only supports spell checking in English). There is a fix available - you just need to launch WLW differently.
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