Windows Live Writer Review – Posting into WordPress.com (Part 3 – Editor options, editing and posting)

This post is in continuation to the earlier two post on installation and configuration of Windows Live Writer. This post explains the editor options available in Windows Live Writer (WLW). Also it explains on how to create a post and publish it onto the your blog service.

Most of the screenshots in this post will spill out of the visible frame. Please click on the images to open them separately. I apologize for this inconvenience, I wasn’t able to fit the screenshots within the visible range.

The Windows Live Writer opens with a blank blog post. Before we start creating a post, lets explore the menu items.

Clicking on the Weblog=>Edit Weblog Accounts should bring up the above dialog. Here, you can add you other blogs for the same account or can add a new blog service or can modify your existing account settings.

Clicking on the on the Tools=>Preferences should bring up the above preferences dialog. Most of the preferences are common sense and self-explanatory.

I did not see any plugins installed with the WLW by default. Also the microsoft WLW web page did not have any link to downloading any plugins. But on google’ing, I could find this link which gives Tagging and Flickr plugins for WLW. I haven’t tried this yet.

Creating a post is prety straightforward. Click on the Title block to enter a title and then start typing in the body. The Insert pane on the right side should let you insert an image, link or map.
The Insert map feature wasn’t working in my case. The dialog was just empty as shown below.

The spell check feature was just fine.

Now the the preview feature is really useful, in the sense that you would preview your post as a web page even before you publish it.

I could access the categories that I had created from my wordpress.com account, by clicking the categories button on the top right corner of the window.

One feature I would have loved to see is adding a new category from within the Windows Live Writer. But I guess its not a limitation of WLW, but that of the wordpress.com service. The wordpress.com service should be exporting web APIs to create categories. WordPress.com folks, correct me if I am wrong.

All the recent post could be accessed by clicking on the recent post link on the right hand side pane. This should give you a dialog like what is shown above.

Conclusion:

Now there is nothing special about this blog editor except for the fact that you can have your post edited in the offline mode (that is when you are not connected to the internet) and publish them to your particular account when are online. One more advantage of WLW is that you get to consolidate all your weblogging accounts under different service providers under one umbrella. This lets you manage multiple accounts from one application. Other than these I could not tell any noticable feature in the WLW. Though the option of inserting maps was there, it did not work when I tried this during this review. Also I am not sure how frequently you would referring to these maps unless you have a blog on street shops and traffic updates.

In my review, I could not really add a category to my wordpress blog from the WLW. On a whole, its an average application with lots of potential to be a great tool (with some little tweaking of features )

The windows live toolbar gets installed if you have selected. I haven’t tried windows live toolbar completely. But one feature that I really liked is that, it lets you browse from multiple tabs from within the same internet explorer windows. Guys, I think I have seen this feature somewhere .

Also, the windows desktop search can be selected during installation. I guess microsoft is trying to sell some of its applications which could never make it on their own through WLW.

You might find the following links on Windows Live Writer helpful:

Microsoft Windows Live Writer Official Blog Site

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/13/windows-live-writer/

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/08/14/windows-live-writer-have-your-say/