Web Tech Daily

Still using WordPress’s or Blogspot’s in-built editor for blogging? You might want to use a dedicated blog editor for the job and as of today, nothing beats Windows Live Writer. Windows Live Writer is a must-have free software if you are into blogging. Its What You See Is What You Get editor is pretty powerful and produces good HTML code unlike Microsoft Word.

Listed below are top 10 reasons why you would want to use Windows Live Writer:

1. No need to save the images first and then insert into the post you are composing. Have a screenshot or image in the clipboard? Just paste it in.
2. Image resizing. Can your blog hold only images up to 500px wide? No problem. For an image that’s wider than what can be fit in the content area of your blog, simply specify the width, 500px for example and the height will automatically be proportionally set. The thumbnail will automatically be linked to the full sized image (the link can of course be removed easily from ‘Link to’ dropdown).
   
3. Ability to specify whether the images should automatically be uploaded to your blog or to any FTP server. Hence there’s no need to upload your images separately to sites like Imageshack.
4. Twitter plugin. Just before a post is published to your blog, Twitter plugin will bring up a dialog box in which a TinyURL of your blog post link is present. You can edit the tweet and publish it to your Twitter.
    
   Twitter plugin for Windows Live Writer can be installed by following this guide.
5. The ability to select existing categories and create new ones right from the program interface.
   
6. Image layout options: Inline, Left, Right, Center; We can also set custom margins on all the 4 sides for an image.

   Windows Live Writer has multiple options for borders:
   
   Most of the images inside posts in this blog just as the one above uses ‘Drop Shadow’ border.

7. Need to go out in the middle of writing your post? Windows Live Writer has that taken care of. Just hit Ctrl+S and a draft of your post is saved so you can always revisit and continue where you left off.
   
8. The ability to add multiple blogs. Simply select the blog that you want to publish to in the top right dropdown.
    
9. Rich text editor. Just like in MS Word, you can Ctrl+B to bold text, Ctrl+U to underline, Ctrl+I to italicize etc. Quotation marks, Ordered and unordered lists work great too.
    
   The keyboard shortcut to hyperlink a word is Ctrl+K.
10. You can preview how your post looks as if it’s posted in ‘Preview’ tab and edit the HTML source in ‘Source’ tab.
    

Other notable features

• Integrated spell checker: Although this is not as great as the one in Firefox, something is better than nothing. The spell checker fails to recognize some common program and Internet-related terms. If my memory serves right, it flags ‘Google’ and ‘Firefox’ as misspellings (can’t verify any more since I have them added to its correction list).
• Interface automatically shows your blog’s theme and imports the stylesheet. So you actually feel that you are directly typing inside your blog in the font style of your blog.
  
• You can insert tables, maps, tags, videos, code snippets and more.
  
• Has proxy support so you can for example, blog from your office as well.

Conclusion

Windows Live Writer makes blogging easy and fast so ultimately you write more in less time. No more fiddling with image resizing, manual uploading and clumsy feature-less editing. Writing blog posts inside it as easy as using MS Word. If you are still using the editor of your native blogging platform, it’s time to give Windows Live Writer a try. You will like it.

Windows Live Writer Home Page

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