Test Driving Windows Live Writer

I’m writing this post inside Windows Live Writer.  After reading David Risley’s post about it, I decided to give it a try.  Oh, and by the way, if you got some weird thing in your RSS feed from AG:3k about theme detection or some other kind of nonsense, please disregard it.  I apologize.  What happened was Live writer here was posting a test post so that it could pull my blog theme design information.  I’m guessing so it can display my post exactly how it’s going to appear on the site.  Looks pretty close.

Let’s use this next paragraph to see how it handles image insertion.  It displays the image as it will appear, and not just a string of HTML.  Let’s see if I can drag it around inside the text to place it just right.  When you select the image, you get a properties panel on the right, and you can change the Text Wrapping, the margins, even change the border to display a drop shadow, rounded corners, and even a reflection.  Super sweet.  Changing the margins adjusts the picture and text in real time, which is quite handy.

You can adjust the size of the image with grips at each side and corner, and like the margins, the text adjusts in real time.  In Wordpress, you’d have to edit the post, change the values, update the post, check the post, and repeat if needed.  Live Writer handles it nicely.  I just resized it so the height of the image aligns better with the height of the previous paragraph.  There are also more advance options like Rotate, Contrast, Crop, Tilt, and Watermark.  Yeah, they do what you think they do.

There are other fun things you can insert, like tables, maps, tags, video, and photo albums, but I won’t get into them right now.  I’ll just throw in a map of Milwaukee to balance out the page a little bit.

It looks like all of the functionality in the regular Wordpress interface is here, too.  Categories are at the bottom, complete with your blog’s categories. Tags are there, too; it pops up suggested tags as you type, based on your existing tags. Expanding the pane at the bottom will allow you to change the post’s slug, add a password, and excerpt, set the author of the post, turn pings and comments on or off, list sites to send trackbacks, and set the date/time of publication.  The only thing that seems to be missing are the custom fields.  Those are kind of important for me, since I need to use one for all those nifty thumbnail pictures on the main index page.  There doesn’t appear to be any way to do it.  I guess I’ll just have to schedule my posts for 15 minutes in the future, and add the custom images during that time.  No, wait… under “Save draft” there’s an option to “Post draft and edit online.” That should make it easier.

As if all this functionality isn’t enough, there’s a bunch of plug-ins available to expand it even more.  Like this plug-in I just downloaded that will turn any highlighted text into a link to its Wikipedia entry. (Yeah, I just used the plug-in to make that link.)

The bottom line: Windows Live Writer is pretty amazing.  Aside from the custom fields, there’s nothing missing that I can tell.  In fact, it even adds a bunch of impressive, useful features. It takes WYSIWYG to an entirely new level.  Aside from Wordpress, it also supports the other major blogging platforms.  I will be using this to compose my blog posts from now on.

Update – After publishing the post, I gave it a once-over, and it appears exactly as it did in Live Writer. Yeah, this is an amazing program.
Second Update – As you may have already guess by now, Live Writer is for Windows only. It’s not available for Mac, unless you dual-boot or run a virtual machine.

Tagged as: Blogging, free download, review, Windows, wordpress