Every Flavour Beans

The new desktop blogging tool from Microsoft - Windows Live Writer - is worth checking out by all the Windows users. It looks good, is fast to operate and packs enough functionality to get most of the everyday blogging tasks done conveniently.

The major features of the product include: rich text editing in WYSIWYG style, multiple options for choosing preferred editing mode(see screenshots below): Normal Mode, Web Layout Mode and HTML Code Mode; easy switching between edit and preview modes, easy uploading of the images - to the weblog or to the FTP server, easy way to insert Windows Live Maps into a blog post(wish there were similar support for Google Maps too ;) ), saving the drafts on the local machine(Ctrl-S) or on the weblog(File -> Post Draft to Weblog…), auto-save option, automatic or manual spell-checking option etc. 

It also allows changing the weblog settings right from inside the Writer(very few settings can be edited right now, though). The weblog categories are also imported into the Writer and are made available to the blogger for tagging the posts with them.

Writer supports multiple weblogs to be managed from the single interface; weblogs can be maintained through separate accounts for each weblog(access them from the Weblog menu or the drop-down list box at the top-left corner).

All in all, a good initial beta version of the product without any major irritating bugs/shortcomings. There were some minor hiccups though, like the spell-checking tool failed to recognise the word blogging!

Its strange to believe that the developers chose to just insert the spell-checking engine and the dictionary into the product without doing any customisations to better suit the blogging needs. Other words that it couldn’t recognise include: screenshot, weblog and blogger.

Adding Pictures To The Blog

It appears that, going by the feedback from the blogger community, the developers of Live Writer have put in extra amount of effort to help bloggers manage the pictures in their blogs. Inserting pictures in a post and uploading them to the server are straight-forward jobs in Writer; it also provides many other ways in which the images can be manipulated prior to publishing of the post. Selecting the image inserted in the post will open up the Image Properties sidebar on the right side, and from here, many operations can be performed on the selected image, like new dimensions for the image can be specified in pixels, or one of the available pre-defined sizes like small, medium, large can be selected from the “Image” tab of the sidebar. 

A side note: If you select medium or large size for the image, it is immediately enlarged in the editing window. This gave difficult time to me while scrolling up and down the image to type the normal text. I don’t know if there is an option like “Always show thumbnail of the image in the editing window…” in the Writer yet, but if there is not, then I recommend it to be one of the features to be added to the final release. I don’t want to edit blog posts carrying images of dimensions 800×600!

The image can be rotated and its brightness can be adjusted. Various effects can also be applied to the images from the “Effects” tab of the Image Properties sidebar. Simple transformation like converting images to black & white can be done or custom Watermarks can be added to the images. 

The sidebar also has the options to specify how the image should be laid out with respect to the surrounding text(left, right or inline). See Image Properties -> Layout. 

Some Weak Points Of The Live Writer

Though the Writer did not show any recent posts from my weblog(for some strange reason), it did allow me to fetch the last n posts and edit and publish them from Recent Posts -> More… link in the sidebar. But every time I click on the More… link and select my weblog, its fetching the entire list again without bothering to cache any of the information already fetched.

One obvious weak point of the software is that it runs only on the Windows operating system. It may not mean much to the dedicated Windows users, but the trend these days is to get into habit of using such products which are available for maximum number of platforms. With Microsoft, one can’t even hope that a GNU/Linux version will be made available in the future. Mac OSX version might be released depending upon the mood of Microsoft.

Installing Windows Live Writer Beta

I will quickly go through the steps to install Windows Live Writer on a Windows machine, mostly guided by the screenshot images. Download the software from Microsoft’s website and click the installer file to start the installation process. The installer includes the option to create a Windows Live Spaces account for those who don’tyet have a blogging account. Nice way to advertise their service!

If you have your own blog, you need to enter the details of your blog in the next dialog box. Live Writer will try to automatically detect which blogging software is being used for the specified blog and will download and configure the blog software settings to the local machine(this information is used to publish the blogs, fetch previous posts, show the preview of the post, among many other things).

The Writer software supports publishing to an impressive number of weblog software, ten in all. Apart from these 10 blogging software, blogs which support the MovableType or Metaweblog publishing interface(API) can also be used with the Writer. If the Writer fails to detect the blogging software for the specified blog, it prompts the user to select it manually(Wordpress, MovableType, LiveJournal, Wordpress.com were automatically detected; Blogger.com was not detected, as Live Writer apparently isn’t yet aware of the new Blogger Beta publishing interface I guess).

Once the installation is finished, the Writer will open an empty post in the theme style set in the blogging software. This particular feature needs some work in my opinion as the theme that I use with my wordpress software was not at all satisfactorily emulated by the Writer. I switched to “Normal Mode” to continue editing and there were no problems here. HTML geeks though will have to face a lot of difficulty if they want to edit in raw HTML mode as all the bugs of the product seem to have taken refuge in this particular feature(event the ‘Del’ key is not working properly in this mode). The most impressive feature of Live Writer has to be its “Web Preview” feature; it shows exactly how the blog will look like once the current entry is posted to it. Even the “Recent Posts” box in the sidebar is appropriately updated(a thumbs up to the Wordpress’s publishing API)!

 If you ever change the look & feel of your weblog, just select View -> Update Weblog Style menu and the local settings will be updated.

End Notes

I haven’t used very many number of desktop blogging tools in Windows, so can’t say where this product could stand among them, but its zero cost, slick appearance and decent functionality should satisfy most of the expectations of regular bloggers.

Note: I have never posted any blog from the Windows operating system before; I am primarily a GNU/Linux user. The appeal of a free desktop blogging tool from Microsoft was strong enough to persuade me to hunt for an Internet-connection enabled Windows machine at my home and test this product on it. I have installed the software just now, and am posting this blog entry from it even without first testing it on a test blog(my confidence levels are high). The only problems I faced while composing this post and publishing it were with taking screenshots(such a long procedure in Windows!) and editing them(I know nothing except GIMP; no time to install it on Windows). I had to copy the screenshots to my GNU/Linux machine, edit them and bring them back to the Windows machine. Other than that, the entire exercise of posting this entry was a pleasurable experience.