BytesWired

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it a breeze for anyone to start blogging and publish rich content media without knowing what HTML is.

It has to be one of the coolest publishing tool available out there. Although you may think it comes way too late compare to other tools but they managed to put nice features in this application. That is what Microsoft good at eh? Not quite a pioneer or front runner in software but more of like grabbing ideas from others and make it better one. Does it really matter if they can put something great like this one? I don’t think so.

Setting Up Writer

Before you can begin writing, you need to let the application know your existing weblog account. It currently support more than 10 weblog services such as Windows Live Spaces, MoveableType, Wordpress, Blogger and others.

You can even configure which folder in your web server to hold all the images used in your writing.

Below are a short list of features available in Writer.

• WYSIWYG

Once configured the settings, you can immediately start writing. Writer is also able to download your visual theme on your blog and thus letting you see exactly how it will appear online. You don’t have to preview it online.

• Rich Media Content

You can easily insert picture, map (from Microsoft Virtual Earth), tags and videos and other media as well. It can be done with just a few clicks without knowing the codes to embed these media to your blog. Isn’t that awesome?

When you embed a picture to you post, you can even manipulate the picture like applying watermark, transformation, set borders, resize and more. All without using other software.

Writer also supports plugins to make it more interesting and easier to write. At this point of time, there are close to 70 plugins available from their site. However, please note that most of the plugins are developed by third party. So, be cautious when downloading plugins from them.

• Easy Publishing

Publishing has never been easier. Once you finished writing, just click on ‘Publish’ button and it will upload to your weblog.

• Other common features including :
  • Offline editing
  • Spellchecker
  • Support multiple languages

Although there are nice features offered in Writer, there are rooms for improvement. For example, once you click on Publish, you can’t cancel or terminate the process. It’s not really critical but it’s nice to have it there. Well, at this moment, it is still in beta, that means they are still testing and improving it as you read this post.

Can’t wait to get my hand on the final release. By the way, did I tell you that I am publishing this post using Microsoft Live Writer?

If you started using one already, share with us your experience using Microsoft Live Writer. It’s definitely a great tool for beginner or anyone who dislike coding.

Get Windows Liver Writer at http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 8:51 am and is filed under General, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.