One of the part of blogging is to find right tools to make the Writing, formatting parts simpler. One such tool is Windows live Writer. This is a free download as part of the windows live Essentials and it is amazing.
The live writer support all major blogging engine including WordPress, BloggingEngine.net
so that was nice. Further it integrates with the theme of the blog thus preserves all the visual aspects as well. Unfortunately there are no options that I could find that meet my needs. Here I enumerate some of the feature of Live Writer which I have used over the last few years.
1. Deep Integration with Lots of Blogging Service.
Everything, I can do with posting blog post with the software which came with WordPress, I can do with Live writer, Rich Editor, Inserting Videos, Pictures, Post as Draft, Publish the post, etc. The Client is very intuitive and fast. This thing makes blogging fun. As mentioned above, this however, is not limited to WordPress, Live writer works seamlessly with tons of blogging services, including spaces, BloggingEngine.net, typepad and tons of other services.
2. Office like Ribbon
I have always been a big fan of Office Ribbon, it just makes discovery so much easier. I am able to find features easily,
which otherwise, previously I had never used. The Live Writer Plugin is no different. It provides contextual access to different ribbon. e.g. When I am editing it enables the Formatting pieces, etc. Spell check, Word count etc. become instantly accessible.
3. Amazing Picture (or Video) Integration.
This is another great feature, it makes integrating videos and pictures so much easier in the
blog. The kind of finishing it provides, would be really difficult to do If we had to do this manually.
The integration with online albums from skydrive is super cool. Its very well integrated and makes my blog look so professional. All I have to do is setup some pictures on skydrive and live writer integrates deeply and sets up the albums with lots of options to tune the album as it seems fit.
The same goes with video, amazing attention to details, you could embed videos from anywhere, its gives a nice preview and makes playing with media so much fun.
3. A great plugins ecosystem.
A lots of amazing plugins have been written to enhance the experience that one can have with live writer from, integration with non-supported blogging services, plugins for beautify code in your blog post. You can find these plugins here.
4. Blog Migration and backup
One of the not so publicized part of windows live writer is the easy ability to migrate blogs from an one service to another. Just Add another blogging service and publish the same blog to that service. As I have done with this blog.
If you are into blogging, Live Write probably provides the best tool for bloggers. It allows you to create beautiful professional looking blogs, let you see how they would look like before publishing them. In addition it allows you to connect to any number of blogging site out of the box.
Do leave you experiences with live writer below in the comment section.