Trying Windows Live Writer beta 2

Seems to be pretty nice. I told it the url of my blog, and it analyzed it, told me I was using blogger, and installed the appropriate components. It will also allow me to edit in more of a WYSIWYG than the default web-based blogger tool will. It will let me edit in a way so that I will see what the final post will actually look like. No doubt this is because it just downloaded my style sheet from blogger, and is now using some edit-enabled version of some Internet Explorer control to let me do my editing.

While the blogger tool is great, I sometimes suffer from a poor internet connection, and then semi-offline blogging is a good idea.

I don't know if I'll actually use this in the end. It depends on what features it has, how well it works, stability and so forth, but I'll try to do a couple of posts with it to see how it works.

It is quite obviously made for vista, and it looks less than stellar on my XP system, but I don't see myself switching anytime soon. I tried a Vista beta this summer, and I was not impressed. It wasn't stability or anything like that, windows killed that beast years ago. Rather it was the completely unusable "interface" that they have equipped vista with. I love the way Explorer (Windows explorer, not Internet Explorer) works. They threw that out completely and instead gave me some useless search-like tool. If I wanted to search, I'd install google desktop. I organize my files and folders. I know exactly where to find things. I don't use the indexing stuff in xp either.

It's going to be interesting to see how it handles spelling and tags (called categories) here too. I really like the way it is done in the blogger web tool. (Hmm, not nearly as good as blogger, but it's just one thing. We will see).

I can't insert pictures, because it has some weird "upload to ftp"-functionality, which blogger doesn't use. Good thing I don't publish pictures that often then.

How about adding links? (This is a really nice photo blog, you should check it out). That's something I do from time to time.(That seemed to work fine.) Shortcuts for text formatting seem to work fine too.

I also do quotes, from time to time, and I must say that I find the blogger tool lacking in this respect. Things like empty lines before and after quotes show up weird. Also, the (blogger) preview leaves a lot to be desired, since it doesn't take in to account your font size or column width when showing you your preview. Blogger should just load up your style sheet and present the preview via that. That would be much better.

Nicely done of them to put the buttons in the same order as in the blogger interface. Someone up in Redmond is thinking. (Yes, much better quote handling than blogger). That is it for now I guess. More things will follow...

(The last thing I do before posting is spell check. WLW does NOT have this functionality! What a waste. They've been doing it in word since forever. It should be included.)

Going to blogger let me do some spell checks, and I had been somewhat naughty.