Windows Live Writer

Microsoft have dropped out a new Windows Live product for writing blog posts.‘Windows Live Writer’ is supports most blogging platforms and so far looks quite impressive. I hope the Office 2007 team won’t be to offended that I stop using Onenote and Word for blogging.

You can read more about WLR on Liveside or at TechMeme.

Setup was a breeze and uses Really Simple Discovery (RSD), I just told it the URL of my WordPress Blog https://netweb.wordpress.com and Username and Password and it did the rest, no need to hunt the actual XML-RPC link as with other tools.

Now it even has Radio Userland as a built in Blog option so it is a shame that the OPML Editor still cannot operate on Vista 5472. Otherwise this post would be going to http://blogs.opml.org/netweb .

Lets see how easy it is to run through….

 

A quick snap from the Nokia N91 of the screenshot here cropped and reduced in resolution then dragged and dropped from my phone directly to the post. Added a drop shadow, a watermark and shifted the layout of the image to the right with text wrapping to the left.

 

 

 

Click on View -> Preview and you see the actual preview of how it looks on your blog and not some daft preview mode.

 

 

 

 Trackbacks are easy to add, so are enabling or disabling comments and trackbacks for the post. Spell checking is fine and a drop down window for your post categories make this tool quite easy and creatively fun to use.

Now just a last quick drop in of a Windows Live Local Map.

Notice the difference here…. Melbourne has 2KM Aerial Imagery and Sydney has 100m

EDIT: The only thing it suffed up during posting were the margins around the two screen shots with wrapped text above. Also if I manually edit the post from my WordPress Dashboard all the image links get screwed up.