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Using Windows Live Writer

Microsoft has created an offline blogging tool: Windows Live Writer. Connect to internet (even to install it!), register your blog account, it will download the template settings of your blog and done! You can compose your post, save it as draft if you don't want to publish it right away and publish it when you want/have connectivity. Simple!

Yesterday in IndiBlogger meet they gave demo of this software and here I am; trying my hands on it. And I believe at least 50 of the 70 odd bloggers shall try it out. Cost involved: 70 odd pizzas!

You can add your blogs from Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, LiveJournal.com, LiveSpaces.com (obviously!) and some others. I could not find any documentation about what all it supports.

They say you can insert maps. You surely can, but only US maps! So I will insert one of Texas where the all important 4th March primaries have to be held!

Map image

It said 'Update Weblog Style'. I tried doing that and nothing has happened so I guess that works with Windows Live Spaces only.

A good feature is that you can add tags. Both external tags (Technorati,del.icio.us etc.) and internal (Blogger.com or Wordpress.com tags). For the latter use 'Set categories' at the bottom of screen.

You can add plug-ins. There are quite a few on Windows Live Gallery. At least more than the gadgets available for Live.com and most of them were unimpressive and useless. However developers have created nifty plug-ins that interface with other sites like Picasa and Flickr. I downloaded 'Flickr4Writer' and inserted following Flickr picture using this.

pan1-copy

One good thing is that you can add multiple ping servers (like pingomatic.com) and each time you publish a post the server will be notified.

Live Writer is pretty nifty tool. However with Microsoft you can expect some kind of lockin! There is no Linux or Mac version (Well these guys said that you can't even run it on Windows NT Server!) and the posts are saved in proprietary '.wpost' format.

Give it a try. It is good.

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Comments

Vaibhav Choudhary said…
What I like is the name :) Windows Live Writer .. sounds good !
10:55 PM
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