Testing Windows Live Writer

Send to Kindle

I’ve never been that tempted to try a fat client blog writing application. I’ve been reasonably pleased with the built-in WYSIWYG editor in WordPress. I don’t typically blog when I have no Internet connection, which is one of the better reasons given by those who use these tools.

One of my friends (Jamie Thingelstad) swears by a Mac program that he uses to create his posts. Today, I was reading a post on 10 blogging tips on Life Hacker. In the comments below, I was amazed at the number of people who were wildly promoting the Windows Live Writer (WLW) client for authoring their posts. Clearly, this wasn’t one MSFT lover trying to push a lousy tool.

So, I downloaded and installed it. It took me a while to get past the configuration, which was quite frustrating. It won’t even start up until you get the config correct. That seemed silly, since the errors weren’t useful in helping me debug the problem.

Anyway, the problem had nothing to do with WLW. I had a rewrite rule (Apache) on my server, which prevented WLW from sending the appropriate commands. Once I fixed that, the rest of the configuration completed automatically, including bringing down my CSS/theme so that WLW could show me roughly what my post would look like as I type it (which is way more than the WYSIWYG part of WordPress, which doesn’t apply any CSS to the real-time typing).

Anyway, this will be my first live post with WLW (assuming it works). I don’t know (yet) whether it will be my last, but I suspect not. I haven’t investigated any of the settings/options as yet, so it certainly didn’t require any work to figure it out.

🙂

OK, so I hit the Post Draft and Edit Online button (a very cool idea), everything just did what you’d expect. It created a draft on the server, and messaged Firefox (yes, WLW didn’t hijack me to IE, but rather respected my default browser choice!) with the correct URL to the draft post! I’m adding this paragraph and the one below it in my normal online interface.

The only glitch is that the Alt-Text for each of the above links was lost (I filled it in on the WLW side, so I’ll have to look into that). Fixing it was easy, but everything else just worked. Of course, I haven’t done anything like upload photos to a gallery, so that might be an adventure as well. So far, so good.