Microsoft Live Writer
August 16th, 2006
This post is being composed on Microsoft’s latest little beta toy, Microsoft Live Writer - a nifty, if somewhat limited, WYSIWYG blog editor aimed squarely at bloggers familiar with Microsoft Word but, perhaps, not so familiar with XHTML tags and formatting.
I’ll admit: I hate to write XHTML code by hand. Compared to just firing up Word and writing, posting to this blog using my installation of WordPress’s built-in editor is rather annoying, as instead of just clicking ctrl-i to italicize something (as I frequently do) or just highlighting a snippet of text and cut’n'pasting a URL to it, I have to bother with typing my own <em> and <a href> tags all over the place…which makes writing a long, link-filled rant a tedious and error-prone Major Effort. The latest version of WordPress does come with a WYSIWYG editor, yes, but it generates very ugly code and is, quite frankly, very clumsy - even clumsier than hand-coding. Of course, I long-ago thought of writing article in Word and then saving them as XHTML, which I would then just cut’n'past into WordPress - but have you ever seen the XHTML code that Microsoft Word vomits up? It makes the WordPress “rich text” editor’s subpar output look positively utilitarian in comparison.
But someone at Microsoft recently had a great idea: let’s code up a nice little basic desktop blog composer that offers Word-like wordprocessing capabilities but also features handy layout functions such as image positioning and blog category/tag support. And while we’re at it, let’s make the XHTML it outputs as clean and serviceable as possible. Well, here’s to you, J. J. Allaire and the rest of the Microsoft Live Writer development team - you’ve done a great job!
Microsoft Live Writer is a very lean, easy-to-use desktop program specifically designed as a blog composer. The interface is quite intuitive, and offers users access to all of the most common blogging tasks: adding links, positioning images, formatting lists and block quotes, and so forth. It allows one to save local as well as remote drafts of posts-in-progress and offers writers a variety of views to let one write away, preview what the articles will look like when published to the web, and even get under the hood and work with the raw XHTML code when necessary. A quick look at code view will show that the code generated by Microsoft Live Writer is extremely stripped-down and elegant.
Live Writer contains a number of convenient tools for posting pictures and even inserting maps from Windows Live Local into posts - but, as you no doubt have noticed, I don’t usually slather my entries here with pictures, and have no real need of maps at present, so I haven’t yet tried out these features. But considering how strong and functional all of the features that I have used have proven to be, I’m sure these will be equally sterling.
Best of all, the programme works with a wide range of blogging packages and services. Of course, it naturally asks whether you want to use it with a Windows Live Spaces blog first, but it also supports TypePad and WordPress installs (obviously), blogs hosted at WordPress.com, Blogger, and the ubiquitous Livejournal - as well as many others.
The software is completely free to download, though at present it is still listed as a beta release, and as such has some bugs. I’ve not run across any myself, but they’re bound to come crawling out of the woodwork sooner of later. (Besides, this is a Microsoft product: it’ll probably still be coughing up cockroaches even when it’s hit the positive integer point.)
And WordPress users please be aware: though it does handle categorizing and tagging posts, as well as allowing you to set TrackBack, comment, and permalink options, it does not (yet) handle post excerpts and custom fields.
Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a convenient WYSIWYG desktop solution for putting together blog entries with all the ease and quickness of a standard wordprocessing app, then Microsoft Live Writer is an ideal tool. And it’s not like you can’t edit your posts later to add excerpts and the like. The Live Writer development team is actively accepting suggestions as well, so drop ‘em a line with development tips and requests!
(BTW: Microsoft Live Writer is most certainly not the first programme of its kind. There are others, including Performancing, a nifty little Firefox extension which many folks have praised in the past but which I personally found a little cunky. But Live Writer is my new personal favorite, and - I reiterate - is free. Obviously it’s Windows-only, however.)
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