I received an email from Microsoft the other day about various beta’s of which I noticed the Windows Live Writer. This reminded me about seeing a couple of ad hoc posts about it’s compatibility with many of the blogging engines out there including subtext so I thought I would take the plunge.
Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.
Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone.
Writer has lots of features which we hope make for a better blogging experience.
The install is a small 5.40mb file available from the windows live site.
After Accepting the Terms of use you’re asked if you want to change your current search provider and set your home page to MSN.
I personally didn’t check the boxes. Clicking the install button led to quick and painless installation.
When the installation is complete then it’s the matter of selecting what type of blog you will be using it against.
Once we click next then it will be the matter of entering our blog details
Live Writer will go off and gather information so that it can configure itself.
All we need to do it name “the profile”, confirm the details are correct and then click finish.
add plugins and automatically ping blog aggregators. Plugins include:
- Flickr4Writer that enables interaction with Flickr services.
- Insert Video
- Feed Reader Plugin
- For Full List please visit http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?c=0&bt=9&pl=8&st=5
My funky house podcast area uses wordpress for now so I am going to setup another profile witihin live writer for that. Looking forward to having such control over a post or an article…
[Update] – Again no problems looking at my wordpress area, so if you fancy using something different to the normal administration area whether it be a page or a post I would recommend Live Writer….
Please Note that at the time of writing Live Writer is in Beta
Links:
2 Comments
Niki
Man you don’t even know how long I’ve waited for this since disabling my own Movable Type widget (that doesn’t work since Haloscan bypasses that code).
THANK YOU!
Jamie B
What a find. This tool makes it alot easier to maintain my blog. Wonder if the full release will differ from the beta?