I heard some tech podcast and they seemed very impressed with this tool.  It allows you to write your post offline and post later when you are online.  I’m curious about what’s so cool about it.  One clear advantage I can see is that you can write posts in a situation where you can’t be online, but that’s not the advantage they were talking about and it’s not such an advantage to me since I’m very rarely at a computer that’s not online.

Another advantage I can imagine is, if you have several blogs and they are all on different platforms, you can have one interface that works for all your blogs.  I do have a couple of blogs but they’re both Wordpress and I’m not considering any other platforms, so that’s not much of an advantage for me either.

Yet another advantage is, if your blog’s editor is poor, this does seem to have a nice, responsive and full featured WYSIWIG interface.  Again, that doesn’t do much for me, the Wordpress editor is pretty nice as well.

If you write your posts over a period of time and your blog platform doesn’t provide the ability to save drafts, Live Writer lets you save a local copy.  Wordpress does allow drafts.

This is what the interface looks like.  I just inserted this picture of the interface.  I’ll admit, if this works, it was much easier than putting a picture into a post with wordpress.

The text is wrapping and I just had to select a wrap option rather than going into the HTML code and adding a class to the img tag.

Another pretty sweet touch is, when you set it up, it attaches to your blog and pulls down information about your blog configuration.  For example, it pulled down my blog’s categories and the list is available in Live Writer.  Pretty sweet.

There are shortcut links on the right for inserting common items, such as pictures.  Also hyperlinks, tables, maps (microsoft maps, not google maps), tags (but I can’t tell quite what they mean by tags) and video.

It’s free, but it’s windows only.  So far I like it well enough that I’ll use it at least for my next post.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and so far, I see no changes. At least it’s free.

The delayed post appeared!

I wrote this post on Friday May 11th. But it shouldn’t show up until noon on Saturday. Let’s see.

I’m trying a feature I just learned about in WordPress, delayed posting. Yesterday afternoon I made did a test post thaht I post-dated for noon today. It has not yet appeared. (It’s still morning as of this posting). Hopefully this afternoon I’ll see that post magically appear.

Apparently, since version 1.5 WordPress supported pod casting natively.

Does this work?

Update: Yes, it does.

I don’t like that it uses a flash player. I’m generally anti-flash.

Also, categories ARE tags.

Looking through google I found a few posts on the WordPress vs. Movable Type issue. Here’s a few:

http://businesslogs.com/reviews/movable_type_vs_wordpress_my_opinion.php

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=167839

http://www.dustindiaz.com/movable-type-versus-wordpress/

They all seem to lean towards WordPress although it’s not a slam dunk.

The main issues seem to be

• WordPress is open source

• WordPress pages are dynamically published

Movable Type is free but, since it’s a for-profit company, the terms may change in future versions. WordPress is free, and open source. Once you have it you’re free to do anything you want with it.

Movable Type publishes all it’s pages statically. That’s bad when you make a change because all the pages need to be regenerated but for servers, and users, viewing a page should be a little faster. Movable Type now offers dynamic publishing but I hear that many, maybe most, of the available MT plugins won’t work with dynamic publishing.

I’m still curious about tagging. Under MT I can produce a feed for each tag. Can WordPress? I haven’t seen any discussion about that.

Update

Here’s some info on WordPress feeds. It seems WordPress CAN do feeds based on Categories, which may be the same as Movable Types tags.

I’m going to be comparing wordpress against my also new movable type blog at http://knittingmydoom.com/blog which is all about amature, home recorded music – mine!

Immediately what I notice is, I don’t see the concept of tags in WordPress after looking for what seemed to be about 10 seconds.