Menori

Live Writer is quite special. I’m particularly impressed by it’s slick editing style and simple UI. On the surface it is very similar to WordPad but with and Office 2003 feel about it. The Live Team obviously decided not to make the user interface like that of Office 2007. Perhaps that would be a bit premature.Installing Windows Live Writer is simple. As part of the install Live Writer asks for information about your blog. You can create a Live Space automatically or choose ‘custom’ to configure your own should you use a different blogging engine. I use WordPress and all I needed to do was tell Writer the URL of my blog menori.com and then put in my username and password.

Setting up images, like the one on the left which shows the auto detection screen for your blog’s settings, is much like it is in Word. You can select borders and shadows for effects and most importantly choose the alignment. One thing I always found somewhat difficult using WordPress’ native interface is that images can be a bit of a fiddle to position right. It’s something that Ajax related rendering still doesn’t get 100% right. Having a full tool, i.e. installable client, to help with this makes life much easier.

The weblog settings are set up automatically and Writer pulls back your categories but does not pull back details of previous postings by default (like other tools like Performancing.com’s plugin for Firefox does). However, I’ve not seen this as a problem.

Editing

The main editing window provides a very ‘Word 2003′ interface on to your blog. You can choose a ‘Normal’ view which is much like the one in Word. You can also select a Web Layout view which takes the background of your blog (if you have one) and allows you to type in designated areas. This gives you a more accurate reflection of what the posting will look like once it is published. Used in combination with ‘Web Preview’ which accurately renders your blog onscreen for you. I found this feature to be an absolute gem.

You can save your post as you go along but this is a local save and is not actually saved back to your blog at this point. Clearly the advantage of this means that you don’t lose your hard earned work if your Internet connection should fail, something that Writely tries to address through it’s background save feature [I understand that Outlook Web Access has inherited this feature in the Exchange 2007 version.. a godsend].

To put the post up on to your blog you have to Publish. But you have the option to ‘Post Draft to Weblog’or do a full Publish. This does work properly with WordPress. Yippee.

Different Editing Views

It’s easy to forget that this is beta software. But every now and then you quickly get a reminder. Moving between the Web Layout views can cause a lot of screen flicker and sometimes there are long pauses while the application sorts itself out. I also discovered that your cursor needs to be clicked in the editing area (clearly indicating the area you want to edit) when you click ‘Insert Picture’. Seems striaghtforward enough.

Integration

You can supplement your post with all manner of cool Live Service. For example:

Inserting maps from Virtual Earth is a doddle.

Somewhere in deepest darkest Derbyshire

Maps are treated much the same as images and once you’ve searched for your location you can easily put up a map of the place where you were born.

(You’ll have to guess which one of these ‘never before heard of’ Tolkien-sounding places I grew up in).

I imagine that future versions of Live Writer as it approaches production release will have even more integration with other Live Services. It’s a credit to Microsoft that they make these features available so that you can post to any blogging platform.

To conclude

I’m mightily impressed. Seems it was worth the wait after discovering that Windows Live writer might actually be a ‘real thing’. Go an download it yourself from http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/. Get blogging!

[ps. Further to this post. It appears that Live writer failed to post my categories that I'd selected. I did get an error message which I'm going to report. At the moment there's no integration with any tagging engines either. So I had to edit this in WordPress to add my technorati tags. There's an API though for Live Writer so no doubt someone will write the interface. There are also a few problems with picking up the post author and some minor formatting problems which I had to correct in WordPress.]

[pps. It seems that the formatting is effected because of the 'wrap around' done on the right hand sidebar. As the post moves down on the page the amount and positioning of paragraph tags effects where the line breaks are in relation to the wrap around. This is something that would probably not effect Live Spaces posts, or those that do not wrap around other includes in the page. I don't plan to change my template any time soon so apologies for the strange layout of the post.]

Pass any comments about Windows Live Writer not to me but to the people who matter.

If you can comment on JJ Allaire’s blog it’s here

The MSN / Live Group for Windows live Writer is here

The tool itself has a feedback mechanism too.