A Look At Live Writer

Posted by Stropp on January 7, 2008

For some time now I’ve been writing my posts using the standard WordPress editing software. For the most part I haven’t had a problem. Recently, as you might have noticed, I’ve been including some embedded YouTube videos in my posts. Unfortunately, WordPress handles them pretty badly by modifying the specification so that I have to reedit the entry multiple times just to get it right.

There have also been a couple of nagging annoyances such as hitting backspace at the beginning of a word and having it remove the preceding space as well. Aarrgh. I’ve not really been happy with WordPress editing since the 2.x releases.

In the past I’ve played with a program called Ecto on my iBook. It’s a desktop application that connects to my blog and allows me to draft and publish my posts outside of my blogs dashboard. Unfortunately, as nice as it is, I don’t use my Mac that much and all my gaming is done on the PC which means that screenshots and the like are under Windows. It makes it easier to blog from Windows too.

Ecto has a Windows version which I tried tonight. Unfortunately, it’s not a shade on the Mac version. It’s obvious the guy who wrote Ecto is a Mac guy.

So after doing a bit of searching, I came across Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. I’ve downloaded and installed it, and in fact I’m writing this post on it right now to try it out. Want proof?

Here’s a screenie.

Because Windows Live Writer is from Microsoft it does have some options when you first set up your blog account that default to Microsoft blogging services. Aside from that it seems to be really easy to use. If you look at the screenshot, you’ll see me editing this post. Windows Live Writer has picked up the formatting used by Stropp’s World and is applying to my editing. In other words, I’m (hopefully) editing exactly what I’ll see in the finished post.

The only thing, as far as I can tell, that Ecto has over this is Ecto looks through my blog and lists all my previous posts. I can read them in the tool. Windows Live Writer doesn’t seem to do that.

If you’re blogging a lot from Windows I suggest having a look at Windows Live Writer. If you’re a Mac guy or girl, then have a look at Ecto.

And by the way, Windows Live Writer is free.

Now, cross my fingers while I hit publish.

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