Desultory Thoughts

I’m taking a quick look at Windows Live Writer which was released today to the public. It installs on your machine and allows you to compose your blog post without the need to be online. I could see how this might be useful, but will it be more useful than just firing up notepad and then copy and pasting once you get an internet connection? We’ll find out.

So far I can already tell that it’s done a decent job of automatically picking up my blog settings, including font colors and background color. For the non-html inclined, there are plenty of WYSIWYG tools that help you compose a good looking post but you can still access the HTML if you’re so inclined.

Spell checking is a bonus and publishing seems to be a breeze. There are also tools to insert a link, picture or map. I might as well take the opportunity to insert a picture of my sweet family, just so I can see how this works.

We went to Lagoon the other day. This is my family on the train. Some of the options when you insert a picture are to do a “drop shadow”, photopaper (like I chose here), or you can inherit the style that is set forth by your blog style sheet (CSS). You can also add effects (overlays and transformations) to pictures and custom margins are a breeze as well. So far I’m really liking it.

It also imports your tags or “categories” as they’re called. I guess I’ll find out more features as I use it, but it looks like I will be using it until I find a reason not to. Hopefully it will prompt more frequent posts since, as of late, I’ve been somewhat absent.

Looks like another feature is the ability to add multiple accounts to Live Writer. This will come in handy as I publish posts to “Sami Lee Stories” for my daughter on Blogger.com.

Editing a post is easy, too. Just hit publish again and it knows that it’s not a new post, but an edited post. I forgot to spellcheck, so I did (found 3 misspelled words) and re-posted no problem.