I’m trying out Windows Live Writer – it is an offline blog editor. Normally I don’t use these preferring to do my blog writing directly in the WordPress interface. I’m happy to see it handles Technorati tags but it doesn’t sit well with the Tag plugin I’m using in WordPress (Ultimate Tag Warrior).
There is a Flickr plugin (and a Firefox plugin – shock!). However, there doesn’t seem to be any compatibility with WordPress Categories. Yet!
The main advantage of an offline blog editor is that it allows you to write posts when you are not connected to the ‘Net however, as I am connected most of the time and the WordPress backend is more functional that the Live Writer, I’ll be sticking with WordPress for now.
Would just be as handy to stick them in notepad and copy and paste them in later 🙂 That way they’ll get into the right category on the first attempt.
Could be just me and my bad habits… :/
Writer will use WordPress categories, look to the upper right hand side of the editing area, you’ll see a Categories control. HTH.
Thank you Joe,
I hadn’t spotted that.
I started playing with WLW a few days ago after reading about it from Rory Blythe’s blog. I find the tool very good.
I’m not sure about WordPress (I used it a long time ago but then replaced it with Drupal and then dasBlog), but I always found the web-based interfaces difficult to use when it came to uploading images (upload first, then include). I think the best feature of WLW is that it will include the image in the HTML, create a thumbnail and ftp that to the site too.
I used to use RandyRants blogging software but that had limitations too. WLH has some pretty good bugs. I use spellcheck but it decides to try to everything to the US spelling (despite the fact that my XP version specifies UK dictionary).
I’m a big fan of WLW and I’ve learned to hate nearly all online blog-edit screens. One accidental “back” click of the mouse (particularly with a mouse pad) in all of those online writers and you can lose an hour of work. A simple “are you sure you want to navigate away” feature is missing in most of them.
When WLW gets Atom 1.0 Publishing and Live Clipboard functionality, it’ll become my only blog writing tool.
Re the back click losing hours of work, find in “Blogger” that it appears to be that you have lost all your work but go to “Edit Posts” and it is there.
We are getting ready to start developing in Drupal but we have been researching the differences between Drupal an WordPress and the effects of CSS with both… Can anyone provide any feedback between the pros and cons of each? Thanks!