This review’s been a long time in coming. Microsoft Windows Live Writer Beta came out in August and I’ve been using it exclusively to publish information directly to Krunker.com. I’ve finally had time to sit down and write a short review of this application.

So what is Live Writer? It’s an easy to use Windows based word processor like application designed to make it easier to publish postings to various blog engines on the Internet. Live Writer’s main focus is to publish to Windows Live Spaces (a blogging service offered by Microsoft). However, Live Writer supports a variety of other blog engines including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress and many others. The focus of this review is the compatibility with WordPress which is the blog engine of choice for us here at Krunker.com.

Who might be interested in Live Writer? Really anyone with a Windows desktop system and a desire to publish blog postings without having to use a web browser interface. All blog engines provide a browser based user interface to facilitate blogging. Some engines offer WYSIWIG displays while others make you understand basic HTML or proprietary tags that are part of the engine – but all of this resides within the browser. While having a browser interface is handy because it allows authors to blog from any computer that has an Internet connection and browser, it can be a pain to use at times. If you’re always blogging from the same system or from a limited set of Windows systems, an external client tool such as Windows Live Writer begins to make more sense.

Join us as we take a look at the Microsoft Windows Live Writer beta.

Installation and Setup

You can download the msi installation file for the Windows Live Writer here on their website. Installation is fairly straightforward. Let’s show some of the dialog boxes. Here’s the initial dialog box:

The next step is to configure the application for your blog engine. The target audience for Live Writer is of course Windows Live Spaces but as we mentioned before, the application will work with a wide variety of blog engines out there. We’re going to configure it to work with our own blog engine here at Krunker.

Is it hard configuring the app? Not at all – enter in your website URL and an appropriate login and password.

From here – Live Writer will do the rest and attempt to automatically figure the app for your website.

Live Writer will do its best to simulate the look and feel of your blog engine – everything from colors to font styles. Finally you apply a weblog name for your configuration and you’re all set.

And that’s it!

If you run multiple blogs, you can configure Live Writer to work with all of them. Once you’re all set, you simply select the blog that you want to post to, and publish the posting.

The art of blogging..

With Windows Live Writer installed, we’re all set for blogging. Simply start up Live Writer and you’ll get a screen similar to this. Note that Live Writer will always start with the previous view that you were working with.

Live Writer offers four different views for your postings. The four views are:

  • Normal
  • Web Layout
  • Web Preview
  • HTML Code

In Normal mode, the post uses a basic font and design – without specifically using anything from your website design.

If you want to see what your post will look like with basic design elements from your website, you can choose the “Web Layout” view. In this view, Live Writer will add the typeface and colors to your posting – as well as the relative positioning of your posting within the blog itself.

If you really want the whole look and feel of your blog engine, go ahead and choose the “Web Preview” view. With this view, Live Writer will add the entire look and feel of your blog to your posting – giving you the impression that you’ve actually published the posting.

Finally, sometimes you’ll want to tinker directly with the HTML code on your posting. There are plenty of features that a blog engine may support which Live Writer may not have built in support for. If that’s the case, you can directly edit the HTML code to add in that feature if necessary.

Once you have a new post up, go ahead and start typing. From this point on, Live Writer works and feels like a word processor. You can highlight text and perform basic actions such as bold, italicize, and underline. Go and change font colors at whim. Play with bullets and quotes and easily add links by highlighting the text or object.

Other features..

Live Writer offers a small set of additional features that are important to blog posters. Every posting has a properties page which you can edit including:

  • Date/Time of the posting
  • Modifying the properties of comments
  • Allowing trackbacks for others to use as well as providing trackbacks to other blog engines
  • Keywords

Note that if you plan on using keywords for a WordPress blog engine, you will need to get a plugin to add in keyword support on WordPress. Check out Andrew Grant’s blog for a great WordPress plugin:

http://www.andrewgrant.org/keyword-tags/

Live Writer works easily with images but we’ll have a separate section just for that. Another cool feature which integrated a Live service is the ability to add in Windows Live Maps to your blog posting. Once you select the Insert Live Map menu item, you’ll get the following dialog box:

All you need to do is insert the desired address and Live Maps will bring up the map for you. Just like the online service, Windows Live Maps can give you a Road, Aerial, or Birds Eye view of the address. You can then take the image and insert it directly into your blog.

Live Writer also includes a basic spell checker which is DEFINITELY handly

Working with images..

If you work with the WordPress blogging engine, you’ll quickly realize how annoying it is to work with pictures within WordPress. Well never fear – Live Writer is here. With Live Writer, you can easily insert or drag and drop pictures right into the blog posting.

From there, you can resize the image to your desired specifications and apply built in transformations such as sharpen or gaussian blurs. Live Writer will perform the rest of the work for you including resizing the picture and picking the appropriate compression level. I’m not always crazy about the quality of the image after I insert it in the posting but it’ll do for the most part.

Live Writer allows you to easily overlay textual watermarks on your images – here’s an example of an image watermarked with the string – “Krunker” on the lower right corner.

However the best feature of Live Writer is just letting it handle the process of uploading image files to your blog engine. Live Writer will automatically post your image files in an appropriate directory and handle any file naming conflicts as well.

Summary

Windows Live Writer isn’t perfect by any means – there are several issues that users have addressed that may or may not be show stoppers for you in using the application. Live Writer may not fully support of your blog engine’s features. When you press the Publish button, you can’t do anything else with Live Writer – yes – we’re begging for a background publish process. There are other issues I’m sure but I can’t think of anything major at this time.

For straightforward blogging, Windows Live Writer is a great choice for those who really can’t stand browser based blog posting. With it’s WYSIWIG display to ease of use to useful feature set, Live Writer is simply a winner when it comes to blogging. The best part of all? It’s free folks. It’s free.

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