I’ve just updated Windows Live Messenger to version 2009. It also offered to install other Windows Live tools, which I did. And you know what – Windows Live Writer rocks! Before I was using Microsoft Office 2007 Word for writing and publishing blogposts and it was doing it job, but now I’ve got a lightweight and really easy-to-use tool to manage my blog. And it’s free so I can install it on my laptop (which has got only Outlook 2007 on it). It can save any post as a draft, edit it later, it’s got live preview tool (which works amazingly fast), you can either work with wysiwyg or with plain html code – and I bet this is the cleanest wysiwyg I’ve ever seen. I really mean it – it generates absolutely clean HTML, and it uses my blog visual theme!
And the configuration process was great as well – I just entered my blog url, username and password, it fetched the theme information and that’s all – I’m writing, previewing and publishing posts!
So, the key features of Windows Live Writer (for me) are:
it’s kerfuffle-free:
it works fine with my wordpress blog
wysiwyg generates really clean code so I don’t have to edit the code manually after I finished writing the blogpost
it’s got good spellchecking mechanism
it has a nice twitter plugin that puts a twit with a link to the new blogpost
it contains most often used photo editing functions – so I don’t need to install anything else on my netbook to post to my blog when I’m travelling.
it automatically fetches all the categories from the blog – you just need to set them, plus you can add categories if you want
it can save drafts both to local storage and to the blog – so if I’m writing a huge blogpost, I can proceed editing it when I’m travelling or finish it at home.
it’s lightweight and really fast
it’s completely free
and it’s got plugin architecture so we’ll see more interesting stuff coming!
Good stuff, Live Team, thanks!
P.S. for more information, read this blogpost.