As I posted in this blog entry that I will be trialing three offline blogging tools, which are Windows Live Writer, Zoundry Raven, and wBloggar. After couple of days of testing, I’m most impress with Windows Live Writer and Zoundry Raven. They both are solid and very easy to use offline blogging tools. Windows Live Writer gives a richer user experience, on the other hand Zoundry Raven gives a better manageability for those who have multiple blogs. Since I only have one blog, I decided that Windows Live Writer is more suitable for me. So here is a review of Windows Live Writer.

Installation

The installation uses web installation and offers you if you want to install other Windows live components, such as Windows Live Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, etc. I chose to install just the writer.

Setup

The setup wizard starts by asking you what blog services you use. It has option to use Windows Live Space, SharePoint Blog, Other Blog Services, and if you don’t have a blog, it has an option to create a blog using Windows Live Space. I chose the other blog services option, and the next step that I had to do is to provide the details of my blog such as: the URL of my blog, Username, and Password. After providing my Blog details, It then try to detect all the settings that you have in your blog and apply it automatically. At the end of the detection phase, it asks for your permission to make a dummy post to detect your theme settings. After it detects your theme settings, you’re set to use Live Writer.

First Impression

The software looks really good. It has that Microsoft Office feeling to it, without the ribbon control of course. The software works sort of similar to a text editor software. Once you open the Live Writer, it will automatically create a new blog entry, you can start writing your blog right away. It has the standard text editor with toolbars that allows you to format the style of the text, and insert other elements such as: hyperlinks, picture, photo album, table, map, tags, and video. The text editor comes with 3 views: normal view, source view, and web preview.

Windows Live Writer allows you to save a local copy of your blog, or post it online as a draft (can be done multiple times, it will just update your existing draft post). It keeps track of all the drafts you saved locally, thus you won’t be losing any post. You can open any post that saved locally or ones in your web. There is a delete menu which deletes the local copy only, to delete both local and web copy, you have to use the open dialog and delete it from the dialog. I think this is very impractical and wrong. Think about it, to delete your post you have to go through the open dialog. To me that’s a UI and Workflow FAIL.

Features

As I mention before, Windows Live Writer features element embedding. I decided to give them a try. I thought those would just insert the elements, but i was wrong, it gives you more. For example, when you insert a picture it gives you the following options:

• Layout Options: text wrapping, picture margins, and picture borders (Drop shadow, photo paper, rounded corner, etc).
• Picture edit options: resize, rotate, crop, contrast, tilt, and watermark.
• Picture effects: black and white, sepia, gaussian blur, adjust temperature, emboss, sharpen, and color pop.     

Other than inserting basic elements (links, pictures, and tables), it also has photo album, map, and video insert feature. Photo album basically allows you to insert multiple photos to your blog as a Windows Live album. Wait, did I say Windows Live Album? Yes I did, and this means you have to have a Windows Live ID (you can just use your hotmail account). When you insert a photo album, it will create a picture link to your windows live album, which can be customized. Inserting a map will also use Windows Live services.

Windows Live Writer comes with a built in Spell Checker. It works the same way as one you found in Microsoft Office. If you make a wrong spelling, it will red underlined the word. When you right click on the word it will give you suggestion of the possible right words. It also comes with a word count. Not sure how useful it is, but hey, its a plus.

One of the coolest thing with Windows Live Writer is that its extensible, that is you can add plug-ins to the software. Clicking the “Add a plug-in…” button will open up a page in your browser that lists all the available plug-ins for the Writer. Some of the noteworthy plug-ins are: Flickr4writer, Picasa Image, FacebookPhotos, Twitter Notify, and Insert Code Snippet plug-in. I instantly downloaded the Insert Code Snippet plug-in and love it. It works like a charm. I’m going to use this from now on, instead of screen capture images.

Conclusion

I found that blog writing is a lot easier and much more fun with Windows Live Writer. I didn’t find any major problems or defects when I used it. I highly recommend this offline blogging tool to anyone who blogs.

RWendi

I have been using Notepad++ to write my blog offline. Its very inconvenient, impractical and im getting sick of it. I decided to find a better tool to write blogs offline. Im looking for a free bloging tool that allows me to publish blog post to my blog automatically. It has to have WYSIWYG text editor with the ability to view the html source, Automatic file or image upload, and most importantly, it has to work with no hassle with dasBlog.

After some googlings I found the following candidates:

• Windows Live Writter
• Zoundry Raven
• wbloggar

They all look very promissing. I'll be trialling these software to see which one suits my need. Will post my findings soon.

RWendi

For the last couple of days, I've been reading on Joel Spolsky blog quite regularly. Just a bit introduction on the guy, He's the CEO of FogCreek Software and one of the team member of the guys on StackOverflow.com. His past experience includes Program Manager of Microsoft Excel team, working in Viacom Interactive Service, and Juno Online ISP.

I enjoyed his blog alot. Well written and very concise articles, which includes examples that is easy to understand. He even used real life example that has happened in the IT industry in the past. For example in his article "Things You Should Never Do, Part 1", which says that we should never start over from scratch. He gives an example how Netscape lost its market share when netscape decided to ditch their code and started from scratch. Some of his example also includes from big companies like, Microsoft, Sun, and IBM.

His articles include best practices in software development, team management, software product management, and software company management. In this article, he describes 12 questions that test a quality of a software development team. I have to say I agree with most of them, except for the last one which i think not necessary. He mentions the importance of functional specifications in this articles, couldn't agree more with this. He also has a business strategy related articles for software development company. Since its always been my dream to run my own software company, I enjoy the article a lot.

Moreover, He has articles that describes his philosophy in building his company. He has done a great job in creating a very desirable work place, which he describes here. If you're lazy to read up his post, you can just see the pictures of it here. It amazes me how he's willing to invest so much on it (considering that his company is not even classified as med-size company), and that he does it for the sake of his programmers. I honestly thought only google does this.

His blog is by far the best blog I've ever read. Not even one article I've read was badly written. Highly recommended, adding him to my blogroll.

RWendi

Last week my site was attacked by spammer. On my How to create code snippet entry, some idiot decides to spam it. It had 147 of spam comments. Its funny I must say why someone/some bot decides to spam my site. Its not like my site is getting a huge number ammount of visitors. Well anyway, I thought the spams were a temporary thing, so I decided to just remove the comment XML file and not doing anything to prevent it from happening again. Boy I was wrong, it happened again!! This time is not as much (only 15 spam comments), but it shows how the spammer is still keen on spamming my site.

Having to know nothing about how to prevent spammer, I decided to prevent this in simplistic way, which is to change the comment settings to require approval. This means that the spammer's comment will only visible to me, unless if I approve his comments. I was thinking that maybe by doing so the spammer would just give up, since he's not able to see the result of his spams. I was wrong again!! The idiot still spamming me with useless comments filled in with links to mallicious sites.

I decided to have a look on dasBlog configuration settings, I thought that spammer must be a common problems to blog sites, and I assume that dasBlog should have implemented something to help fight spammer. Luckily, dasBlog does have a spammer settings. It has a couple of options, but one settings that caught my eye was "Enable refferal blacklist". I had it enable, and entered the spammer IP address to the list. I thought that would do the trick, but it didn't work.

Not able to have the blacklist working, I opted to another settings which is to enable Akismet. Akismet is a spam blocking service that's free for personal use. Akismet requires an API key which you'll get when you register an account with WordPress. So I created a WordPress account and use the API key for my blog site, and it works!! In dasBlog you get an option to automaticaly remove the spam or wait for my authorization before removing it. I just set it to automatic, and I've never seen that spammer spams my site anymore, awesome! If you had problem with spammer in your blogsite, I highly recommend the Akismet service. It works like a charm.

RWendi