Using Windows LiveWriter to Publish Blog Posts
I have been using Word 2007 to blog to my WordPress blog for a long time now. However, today I finally decided to give Windows LiveWriter a try. This posts comes from Windows LiveWriter.
There are many things that are immediately apparent as being better than Word 2007:
- Free: First up is the fact that it is free.
- Blog Theme Integration: As soon as I added my blog to this, it downloaded the theme from my blog. Now what this does is that it allows me to exactly see what the post is going to look like when it is published on my blog. It copied the CSS, any image files used by the theme, the fonts, and everything.
- Image Manipulation: I have so many more options when I insert an image in the blog post. For example, I can specify Alt Texts; I can link the image so that it opens up in it’s own window in it’s original size.
- HTML View: I get a Html view which allows me to manipulate the HTML directly; a feature I sourly lacked while posting from Word 2007.
- WordPress Options: Since it integrates so well with Wordpress, it allows me to set WordPress specific post options from within it’s environment. I can, for example, set the date I want this post to publish without going into WordPress “Edit Post” link; or I can specify the author (where it gets a list of authors configured on my blog for me to choose from)
- Publishing Pages: It allows me to create WordPress pages. Neat.
- The More Tag: It allows me to insert the Wordpress ‘more’ tag, which allows splitting of the post on the main page.
- Blogging Options: Things such as allowing me to Ping Update servers whenever I make a post. This is useful to let everyone know that you have updated your blog. There is a host of other options available.
This is of course a teeny part of the blogging goodness that LiveWriter offers. There is much more available. I will probably be switching over completely but I will miss some things which Word 2007 did better. It did grammar checking. It allowed me to quickly format my tables. Basically, things that allowed me to be a little lazy while blogging; things which only Word is popular for.
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September 19th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Very useful tool.. So far I have only one issue while using this with bloggers. I can’t add my local images using livewriter, however I can do this using bloggers while posting new article. Any solution?
September 19th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
@Ramesh
I read that the latest release of LiveWriter allows you to upload images to your Google Picasa account when you are blogging on blogger. So get a Picasa account.
I don’t use blogger so I can’t test it out. But do post a comment to tell us if it worked.
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