If you are a user of blogger.com, then you are familiar with the bare-bones post editor. Let’s be frank, here: it sucks. The text window is super small, so you can’t get an accurate picture of what your post will really look like on the screen. The “add image” tool seems to have a mind of its own – at least with me, anyway. Every single picture I added automatically went to the top of the post. Then I would have to drag & drop it to its desired location, or cut & paste the HTML. (Note – throughout this post you will see a few of the many different options Writer gives you for posting pictures). Blogger also does not give you the option to schedule future publish dates for your blog entries. You could save a post as a draft but then you would have to log back in to publish the post manually. I tend to get into blogging moods where I will churn out 5 or 6 posts in one night. But I don’t want to publish them all on the same day.
I first heard about Windows Live Writer on The Blog Doctor. Having already given up on the sucky on-line editor, I’d been using Microsoft Word (Office 2007) to create my posts. Word made it easier to add hyperlinks, format text and control the placement of photos, but when it came time to publish the post, I still had to upload the photos separately and then go back and make sure all the links were working. Also, any cool effects I added to the photos (like frames) didn’t upload with the pictures. Now, I’m sure there was a way to fix it if I really wanted to work at it, but it’s just an example of how Word wasn’t very user-friendly for blog publishing. I like things to just work automatically! And with Word, there was still the problem of not being able to schedule automatic future publishing.
The Blog Doctor’s post encouraged me to give Live Writer a try, and I was immediately hooked.
You will need a Windows Live ID in order to use Writer. If you use Messenger, you already have this. If not, it’s easy to sign up. When it comes time to publish your post, Writer will automatically upload your photos to your Picasa album and link them to the post. Don’t have a Picasa album? I didn’t think I did either, but if you blog with Blogger, you already have a Google account, and by extension you have Picasa as well.
There are many options for cool photo effects -- drop shadows, rounded corners and Polaroid paper are just a few. You can even add your own watermark (as above).
If you use Live Albums, there are even more choices. Look at the way cool options for displaying your albums when you blog with Windows Live. You can even create the album directly from the your post in Writer, like I did with the following pictures:
And last, but definitely not least, my favourite feature: the ability to schedule when you want your posts to publish, right down to the minute. This is perfect for people like me who have only one free day a week to dedicate to blogging. I can write 5 or 6 posts in one day and schedule them to publish one at a time over the following week. That’s also a great way to keep your blog up to date if you are going on vacation and don’t want to be chained to your computer for a week. Writer also makes it easy to past-date a blog entry, which is my “secret” to creating the “About”, “Links” and “Products” pages that my header navigation bar links to.
Okay, now we have this awesome program for blogging and just about everyone with internet access is blogging these days, so why does is seem that hardly anyone knows about Live Writer? Whenever I tell someone, they are so grateful and wonder how they got along without it. I mean, it’s Microsoft, they are pretty good at the viral marketing. I’m surprised Writer doesn’t already come pre-installed on most computers.
There are way more features than what I’ve mentioned here (imbedding tables and maps), so why not try it out for yourself? Let me know what you think!
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Thanks...very helpful!
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