Only The Best

I’ve tried a number of blog services (Blogger, Live Spaces, the dreaded MySapce), packages (Wordpress, GeekBlog), and applications (Semagic, Live Writer beta). Just about all of them have something or other wrong with them. The editors integrated into most services are definitely not perfect.

TinyMCE, one of the most popular web based WYSIWYG editors, does come pretty close. It has the convenience of being accessible from anywhere as it is web based. It has one major downfall though. If you use TinyMCE I’m sure you’ve had to re-format an article time and time again after making one minor change or even so much as clicking the source tab. Forums are scoured with posts about this bug but it remains. TinyMCE has a habit of inserting extra line breaks in <pre> sections, usually when switching back and forth between Visual and HTML views. Live Writer does this on occasion, but as I’ve found through the use of a few big name WYSIWYG editors (coffee cup, even FrontPage at times) this is pretty common. I’ve had to manually fix the HTML a couple of times with Live Writer, but not nearly as often as any of the others.

I’m as surprised as you are that a Micro$oft product has made this list. However, Live Writer does not carry with it the typical bloat or monopolistic suckage known to come in their products. Live Writers intent, if you haven’t guessed from the name, is for posting to a Live Spaces account. Whether it be a general dislike, distrust, dis-anything-else for Micro$oft, I do not use Live Spaces. This is where Live Writer becomes useful as it can be used with other services as well.

So far I have used Live Writer with Blogspot, LiveJournal and multiple Wordpress blogs with no issues. One great feature is that it will detect the service used (most of the time) and retrieve any CSS and style information for local use. What this means, is that you will see your theme while creating your post. There is even an option to preview the post as it would appear on the site without ever posting anything. That in itself is a great feature.

You also have the ability to save local drafts or publish a draft to the blog, which does not mark it as "published". Another great thing is that you can write your post, switch accounts on the Weblog button, and boom, you are now viewing the same post in another theme, ready to post to the newly selected blog with the touch of a button.

Live Writer also retrieves any categories you have setup as well as allow the addition of others from within the application.

Another great feature is the ability to inset quoted text with the touch of a button. Though as I’m writing this I notice there is no quote shown at the end of the text, but I guess that is not a big deal.

There are quick links for inserting hyperlinks, images, tables, maps, tags and videos, as well as support for plug-ins which I have not had a chance to check out yet. When an image is inserted / selected,  the options shown here appear. This makes it easy to set the position, margins, effects, links, etc all from one place. There are a number of effects as well as the ability to set the size, contrast, rotation, etc. Live Writer will automatically upload your images to the site, or optionally to an FTP server if you’ve configured it that way. One thing I’ve noticed is that you will want to make sure to set the Alt text on the advanced tab. By default this is set to ‘image’, which in turn causes the uploaded filename to be ‘image.jpg’. This is unacceptable. I have not yet tested what happens if multiple images are used with the same tag. I would hope it is smart enough to at least implement a numbering scheme or something. By default, pasting an image will insert a thumbnail which is linked to the full size image when clicked.

The views offered include Normal, Web Layout, Web Preview, and HTML view. Normal is not very nice and looks as it would if you were writing the post in Word. Web View is the default and will show the post using the appropriate theme. Web Preview is the one that will show it as if it were already published. HTML view is obvious.

Basically, Live Writer can do everything your current application or integrated editor can, only it does it better and with less hand tuning needed in the end.

Download Live Writer from this link

Filed under: Blogging, Productivity