Last week, Slade Roberson posted a list of his favorite software for writers and asked folks to chime in with their own recommendations. I mentioned the text editor Q10, which I reviewed here, and Windows Live Writer as my two “must haves” for writing and blogging. Since I’ve already reviewed Q10, I thought I might as well tell you all about Windows Live Writer too.
In a nutshell, Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer is a desktop program for writing blog posts. I type and save posts onto my computer and when I’m finished I hit “Publish” and WLW sends my post to my website.
Easy to Use
WLW looks very much like a simplified Microsoft Word. You have your WYSIWYG editing buttons underneath the top menu bar. You can easily make basic formatting changes, create hyperlinks and insert pictures. At the bottom of the screen there are three different view panes available: Edit for actual typing, Preview for seeing how the post will look on your site and Source for adding custom formatting with HTML code.
Like most text editors, you can manually save your rough drafts or set WLW to auto-save for you. It even lets you save drafts to your online blogging platform. It has a spell-check-as-you-type feature and a running word count that’s very handy for gauging your progress as you’re writing. You can also print drafts as they will appear on your blog. I use this feature all the time as I’m an old-school, red pen editor.
When you’re finished with a particular post you click Publish and WLW uses your blog account information to publish the post at your site. WLW also makes it very easy to post to multiple sites, such as my main blog here and my annex Loose Leaves, and to delay publication until a particular date and time.
One thing I love about WLW is how well it integrates with blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger. When I selected the text “Easy to Use” above and chose Paragraph Heading 3 in the formatting menu, the text in my Edit pane looked exactly like it will on my blog. There’s no guessing involved. You can also add tags or categories to each post and keep your categories list synced with your blogging platform.
Easy to Add Features
Another great thing about WLW is the integration of plug-ins. A plug-in is like a mini computer program that works within WLW to add functionality to the program.
Anyone can create these plug-ins and submit them to the official plug-in website. These cover everything from embedding audio or video, to an automatically generated quote-of-the-day, to a Google translation of a text selection.
Most people don’t need these advanced functions, and that’s why Microsoft didn’t include them in the basic program, but they’re great to have available if you DO need them.
The plug-ins that I’m using right now are:
Text Template – This plug-in allows me to save and re-use snippets of HTML code. For example, sometimes I use acronyms, abbreviations and foreign terms that won’t be familiar to everyone, like the acronym WYSIWYG that I used above. I added an HTML tag to “WYSIWYG” so that readers will see the word with a dotted underline, and when they hover their cursor over it a “tool tip” will pop up explaining what it means.
With the Text Template plug-in, I don’t have to memorize that bit of code, but just save it as a template and insert it whenever I need it.
Twitter Notify – This is a perfect “set it and forget it” plug-in. I just set Twitter Notify to create a Twitter update, or tweet, for each new post in the following format: “New blog post: {title} {url}”. The plug-in automatically includes the title of the blog post and it’s web address (conveniently converted to TinyUrl to take up fewer characters, since Twitter only allows 140 character per post).
As soon as I finish a post and click Publish, WLW sends the tweet to my Twitter account. I don’t have to type a thing. You can see an example of this at my Twitter account here.
The Bad News
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, WLW is a Windows-only product, so Mac and Linux users are out of luck.
Aside from that, my only genuine nitpick with WLW is that it automatically saves posts to “Documents/My Weblog Posts” and as far as I can tell, this setting can’t be changed. I like having complete control over my filing system, so this is an aggravation.
Should You Use Windows Live Writer?
For many bloggers, their online blogging platform is perfectly fine for crafting posts. For me, WLW is worth the download for the ability to save to my desktop and to print drafts as they will appear on my blog. When you add in the preview function, the instantly updating word count, the multitude of available plug-ins and the fact that it’s all free, the switch was a no-brainer.
This is the most functional, most user-friendly, least bloated, piece of Microsoft software I’ve ever used. If you have an aversion to Microsoft products, don’t let the name scare you off. If you’re a blogger and you’re looking for a blog post editor more robust than your platform’s default, give Windows Live Writer a whirl.
Windows Live Writer official download site
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