Windows Live Writer

Whenever I’ve installed MSN Messenger, I’ve always unselected all the other stuff that comes along with it: email client, writing client, photo manager, toolbar etc. I figured my needs were already taken care of in those areas. But recently a colleague raved about Windows Live Writer, so tonight I downloaded it and gave it a try.

(And in light of yesterday’s post, if you’re wondering how I could possibly find time, it’s because I finished all my overdue marking about 9pm tonight and just couldn’t face doing any more coding stuff today.)

So far, it seems pretty good. It’s picked up all my categories and tags from Wordpress, and even has a perfect preview with all of my blog styles. It has spell-check just like in Word, and I can easily switch to HTML view if I want to do anything a bit unusual. The HTML it generates looks very nice and clean – it’s definitely not the hideous mess that is WordHTML.

I inserted the image above in Live Writer. It gave me the options of showing a thumbnail and linking to the full version or just showing the image. There were also a range of image effects available – hopefully it magically displays with a drop shadow.

Anyway, this is my first test post with Live Writer, but so far, I’m surprisingly impressed. I’ll stick with it for a bit and see how it goes.