I thought I would scratch out a quick blur about Windows Live Writer.  I’ve been using it to post for about the past four or five entries and I am pleased with my experience so far.  Posting in a rich, offline application is a much better experience, in my opinion, then writing posts in the web browser.

There’s three ways to view your content; Edit, Preview, which provides an accurate rendering of your site locally, and Source for when you might need to plug-in some custom formatting for the post.  Editing actually shows the post as you write in the standard layout that it will be displayed on your blog, accurate colors and formats included, minus the side, top and bottom parts of your blog.  The one thing I see that is missing, or at least I haven’t found it, is a shortcut key between the three editing tabs (Update: there are keyboard shortcuts to move between the three editing views under the View main menu).  Not a big thing though as you mainly stick to the Edit tab and only roam into the others sparingly.

A formatting toolbar exists at the top with all the post formatting you would expect.  Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing unexpected, which is exactly what I’m looking for.  I like the fact that Live Writer is geared towards blogging and doesn’t get in your way with any extra functionality that would be useless relative to writing a blog post.  Having said that, at the same time it is highly extendable and customizable through plug-ins.  Actually, as I was writing this post it came to mind that I didn’t have a built-in way of adding code snippets to a post in Live Writer.  But, taking 5 seconds to search through the plug-ins revealed three just on the first page.  So, I’m sure I can find one that meets my needs.

Finally, the nicest thing about Live Writer, the thing that breaks down any barrier to entry for bloggers, is its seamless integration with many of the most popular blogging applications.  It supports Windows Live Spaces and SharePoint accounts, but also the others you would expect; WordPress, TypePad, Blogger and then the general “all others” option.  You just choose “Add Blog Account…”” from the Blogs Menu, choose your blog type, and give it your URL, username and password.  It takes care of the rest.  From then on you just need to press the big Publish in the top left corner and it magically sends the post to your server.  It will open your web browser after publishing just so you can confirm your post made it in one piece, though that feature can be disabled if you trust that it will be delivered or if it just sounds annoying to you.

One note on WordPress, and maybe other blogging software.  In order for Live Writer to be able to remote publish your post, XML-RPC publishing protocol must be enabled.  You can enable this from your WordPress control panel, under Settings and the Writing tab.

Anyways, I was going to look at several offline options for writing posts, but I’m so content with Live Writer that any more searching would be a waste of time for me.  I don’t know if it is the best overall blog writing software available, but I do recommend it as a viable solution.