I must say, I’m impressed. I truly am. I’d never imagine that Microsoft would have made such a stride to create such a generic blogging application. The power of this program surpasses everything that I’ve seen before in a desktop blogging client. Windows Live Writer is definitely a winner in my book, but…

Why I Like It

First of all, there’s nothing that can beat the speed of offline editing. There’s not waiting for www.myblog.com/wp-admin. There’s no clicking and waiting for the post page to load. It’s just pure editing, quick and easy. It’s great.

One of the best features I’ve seen is that it has the ability to pull over your blogs CSS style so that you can see exactly what the post looks like like. Hit F12 and there’s a live preview of what the post looks like, as if posted on your blog. That’s cool.

Images Are Awesome

Inserting images into a post is the most insane thing I’ve seen. Of course you can drag an image into your post from your desktop and there you go. There’s a built in drop shadow feature that I’ve come to love. It actually edits the image and sets the drop shadow on the image itself. It’s not an after-market style that’s applied; I guess there are pros and cons to this, but all I can see are pros.

When you change an images dimensions in the properties it doesn’t just change the img tag width and height attributes, it actually changes the physical dimensions of the image file. When you hit publish, it uploads the image to your blog with those dimensions. If you decide to link it to the original image, it uploads both the thumbnail and the original image.

Images can be uploaded through the blog’s API or through FTP. There’s also a handy plugin that you can download that can pull images off of a Flickr account.

Other Nice Stuff

  • Some might say the spell checker is normal and it is. However, there’s the one function that I can’t find in any Wordpress plugin. You can have it stop your post and spell check before you post/publish.
  • You can save draft posts locally or publish a draft to your blog, whatever floats your boat.
  • There’s a real cool table editor, but I don’t really do tables. Most people rave over it, however.
  • You can also, easily link to previous posts with this guy. It gives you a list to pick from. You can even pick from posts from another blog you have set up in it.
  • You can also easily insert maps and video, although I have no use for these features.

Why I Can’t Use It

Now for the sad part. I love it to death, and I might still use it for something quick and unimportant from time to time.

Wordpress Plugins

Although there is a little gallery of plugins available, they can never compare to the extensive list of Wordpress plugins that are available. A lot of my plugins have little to do with posting, ©Feed. Some even perform some of the functions the Windows Live Writer can perform, like Flexible upload, which I use to handle dimensions and thumbnail uploads.

But one dead breaker for me is All in One SEO Pack. I need the ability to change the description and keywords of my posts on a post by post basis. SEO Slugs is another plugin that I can’t live without. It trims the slugs on your posts to dump out useless words like a, in, on, etc. Live Writer seems to avoid this plugin when it posts and do its own stuff.

I May Still Use It

I must say, I love it and for this I may still pop it open every now and then. However, on my more serious posts, I’ll pop open the old Wordpress and see what what. Hey, I could always use it strictly for drafting posts, that’s a good idea.

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