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.