Microsoft published a new tool called “Windows Live Writer” which can send posts to your blog which you have created offline. I read about Microsoft’s new app at Winfuture.de this morning, and as I’m interested in such software because I write at several blogs, I decided to give it a try.
When the installation is complete, you have to setup the application. Of course, Microsoft wants the users to use its own blog service at Windows Live, nevertheless it supports Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress. The only thing I had to enter was the URL of TamsPalm and my login data. All other settings were detected automatically.
The program couldn’t download our template… I don’t know why. Without this template, you see a regularly WYSIWYG editing window where you can enter your posts, but if it can use the template, you see your post almost like it would already be published (better than the Wordpress editor, for example – see screenshots below.)
The interface of Windows Live Writer is easy to understand. In my case, I could start writing immediately without reading a manual or trying everything a hundred times before it works, and I think this should be equal for the most other bloggers. And it should be no problem for anyone who can use Word or OpenOffice. But there is also a HTML source code editor for those who like it:
Below some screenshots of Windows Live Writer accessing a private blog which is directly hosted at Wordpress.com. In this case, everything works perfectly:
The list of categories at TamsPalm is displayed, but without hierarchy. This means all categories are equal while we at TamsPalm have many sub-categories. As the program puts all categories in alphabetic order, we don’t know which sub-category belongs to which category:
Now let’s have a look at some formation options. While the link window seems to have nothing special, the image chooser is quite nice. You just have to choose the image files using a dialogue you already know from opening / saving files. This means for me: no difficult and long uploading of photos anymore. Nevertheless I would have wished an option which sets the same width / height to all thumbnail images. But the program seems to have a fixed percentage value for thumbnails (which actually doesn’t look nice, see below). Of course the images can be resized later. There is also a multilingual spelling checker.
You can set post details / preferences and trackbacks, tags and even maps (from Windows Live) can be inserted. While maps, even in Germany, seem to be complete, the satellite images aren’t very detailed in the rural area. Support for Google Maps / Earth would have helped. But Windows Live even works on 3D images in American cities, so there should be detailed images one day.
Now some screenshots of the preferences. Plugins could be interesting, and there are some pages on the web where you can download them.
Let’s try to publish our first post. First everything works fine…
Nevertheless, the post is (was) online! I tested it here - we have a local installation of WordPress (with an own theme, customized sidebars and some plugins) - and with WordPress.com’s service.
Even existing posts can be accessed. But only up to 20. When I checked more than 20, I got an error message:
To cut a long story short, I like the new editor. Now I don’t need to use our special file uploader or to resize images, everything is done by Windows Live Writer. Another problem, before I used it, was offline writing. The text could be written into the notepad, of course, but here I can also place images into my posts. When I’m only again, I just have to push the “Publish” button and wait a few seconds. There are some problems, at least with TamsPalm, but the many interested users have their blogs hosted by a popular service like Blogger or Wordpress(.com) where I had no problems. What I really missed was a table feature and better thumbnail support. So I think I will continue using Windows Live Writer, and if you are looking for an easy and useful blog editor, you should try it, too.
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