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