Top 10 Reasons To Use Windows Live Writer For Writing Your Blog Posts
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:
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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. - The ability to select existing categories and create new ones right from the program interface.
- 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. - 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.
- The ability to add multiple blogs. Simply select the blog that you want to publish to in the top right dropdown.
- 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. - 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.
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October 1st, 2008 at 10:11 pm
I should really try that one. I’ve tried others like it but there is always some soft of flaw…have you experienced anything with this one that you really wish it didn’t do?
October 1st, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Hi Dennis,
I use ‘Syntax Highlighter Plus’ WordPress plugin on my other blog to paste code and when I use its tags inside Windows Live Writer, the code gets messed up. So I have to edit the entry after posting inside WordPress admin interface, delete the jumbled up code that Windows Live Writer displays and paste the actual code.
That’s the only thing that doesn’t work properly in Windows Live Writer from my experience.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:12 am
Nice post. You just tempted me to download Live Writer.. Will check it out now
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:23 am
I use WLW but I have too major problems with it.
1. It recompresses images (I mean when I don’t choose any tweaks). No idea what for, but considering I manually optimize images I use – WLW can increase they size by up to 50%.
2. Sometimes it inserts useless font tags. Again no idea why.
It’s not like Microsoft is good at building communities around their products so I am not even sure where to search for solution to these.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
You present a compelling case to try WLW! Looks like it has some really neat features. Do you know if one can run it from a portable drive?
October 10th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Bill: http://www.techlifeweb.com/2007/02/windows-live-writer-portable.html
October 17th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
[...] Men det er ingen grunn til
November 5th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Amazing post mate,
rated 5 stars. Ive just been looking into getting a blog up and I was thinking wordpress, but this has given me something to think about!
Thanks for the info
December 24th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Hello,
I’m assuming that the insert code snip-it you refer to above is a plug-in right? I just downloaded this the other day, and after publishing a post I went in to edit it- in my blog, not editing with windows live writer, and everything was totally messed up with that post- still is, but I got it good enough that i didn’t want to mess with it. It took a few times to do that too- i tried to edit with WLW and then copy the source code and paste it into my blog editor- it just got worse before I finally got it good enough. any thoughts on that?
December 29th, 2008 at 4:32 am
Is this an advertising post? I search a lot about WLW but all i can find is texts like yours!
WLW really sucks in my opinion, images are getting larger, you cannot edit them all together and it is really slow.
Moreover there is nowhere to get info about WLW apart your paid by Microsoft (?) posts.
I hope that Microsoft will give us some updates, if not WLW is going to die, like Vista…
December 29th, 2008 at 4:38 am
simos: Nope. If this were a sponsored post, I would have mentioned so at the beginning/end of the post.
I have no problem in using and highly recommending Windows Live Writer. By the way, I use it on Vista occasionally as well.
What do you mean by a) images getting larger? You mean, their file size is increasing when you post to your blog? b) not being able to edit the images?
December 29th, 2008 at 4:42 am
Ok, not a sponsored post, sorry for telling that but it’s 4 days i am looking for more infos and all i can find in the US web is posts about “top 10 pros to use WLW”…
Yes i find that the size of the images is larger on net that on desktop (25kb on desktop is 45-60 online because of the WLW)
I cannot edit all the 10 images that are on a post on WLW at the same time with just one click. I have an image blog that publishes 10 photos per post, i have to edit one by one each photo, that’s a problem… I would like a way to edit all the photos of the post at once (change borders, size in ALL the photos).
December 29th, 2008 at 4:43 am
@Simos
I hadn’t posted on WLW (yet?) but I can understand dominating positive opinion. Truth is despite some bugs (which annoy me greatly) it’s still one of the best tools available to compose posts offline. Some of alternatives I tried where on same level but with bugs of their own.
btw I can only agree on images problem, WLW recompressing them is sick habit and I hope would get fixed in the future.
What info exactly are you looking for?
December 29th, 2008 at 4:49 am
a way to edit ten photos at once… (as described above)
The last 4 days I have used WLW in 3 different PCs and a notebook to publish 70+ posts in 7 different blogs – i can say that WLW is really slow and it doesn’t give us a lot of options in mass editing.
December 29th, 2008 at 5:00 am
@Simos
I don’t use many images in my posts. Can only suggest following – get the first image in post the way you need all of them to be, save settings as defaults, insert rest of images. They will all get those default settings.
December 29th, 2008 at 5:13 am
thanks!
December 29th, 2008 at 5:51 am
Simos: You might want to check out http://cybernetnews.com/2008/12/04/free-blog-software-with-post-previews-like-live-writer/
February 4th, 2009 at 4:52 am
Great article. I’ve been using WLW for a little while now and it makes adding code snippets so much easier. I posted my own article on installing and configuring WLW which may be of interest (noting Simos’ comment that he can’t find WLW!). http://skotl.blogspot.com/2009/02/posting-code-snipped-on-blogspotcom.html