Well for the past 2-3 months I have put up with a variety of mediocre solutions for blogging. It was not uncommon for me to use MS Word for writing a post, as my spelling is awful, Dreamweaver for laying the post out and then finally copying and pasting it into WordPress. Not very fun.
After a Blog post from Karthik I decided to try out BlogDesk and also Windows Live Writer. I first tried out BlogDesk and while it is excellent and seems like quite a lightweight application I got the feeling it was a little slim on features. So I finally took the plunge and I am now testing Windows Live Writer. It has defiantly been a little harder to set up than BlogDesk, at first Live Writer did not recognise this blog, after upgrading it seems to be working so far, but I have read of problems with the publishing of the blog. So if this publishes without any hitch then Live Writer will defiantly be my choice for blogging for now. Some of the feature I like are:
- The spell checking works the same as Word so I can correct my mistakes as I go.
- Insert Hyperlink, yes it is easy no matter what you are using but I link to a lot of things so the easier the better.
- Insert Table, again it’s easy no matter, but it’s a hassle I can’t be bothered spending extra time on.
- Insert Video, for some reason I always had problems when adding embedded video through the WordPress interface. I have not tried it yet so it may not be as handy as it looks.
- Plugins – There aren’t loads yet but there are defiantly a few handy ones, I downloaded the Insert Adsense, and Insert Amazon Link plugins which will definitely be handy for my other blogs.
- Tagging you can add Tags from several different providers.
- Update Theme, Live Writer actually downloads the theme of the site so you get a rough idea of the look of the post before you publish it.
- Reminders to set categories. I am a tad forgetful and always forget to set categories, so this comes in handy.
Overall I am very impressed with it so far, we shall see how long it lasts though!