Windows Live Writer

I used OpenOffice to write posts for my blog. It worked nicely and I like the spellchecker. The only problem with OpenOffice was when I wanted to publish the post I had to copy and paste. Sometimes strange things happened to the formatting or there were some other problems that I had to fix online. I started looking at other programs to use, firstly at programs that were already installed on my pc and then on the web.

I found a few programs that looked nice but there were always something I did not like about them until I found Windows Live Writer.

When I saw that it was a Microsoft program, I thought that it will only work for Windows Live, but you can you it to publish to Windows Live, Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, SharePoint, Community Server, and others.

You can setup a few different blogs and then select the one where you want to publish to. When you do the setup Writer will also test the setup.

Writer also makes it easy to add Hyperlinks, pictures, photo albums, tables, and tags. Writer can also help you to publish videos to Soapbox on MSN Video, or to YouTube, and embed them in your blog. And just like photos, it’s easy to align, resize, and caption your videos.

You also have all the standard editing function as well as a spellchecker. If you want to publish your post just click on the ‘Publish’ button. Another nice tool is word count that show the amount of words and characters used in the post.

There is a preview tab to see what the post will look like as well as a source tab for when you want to do some extra tweaking. You can save a draft and finish it. You can also add some plug-ins for example Twitter Notify to send a Tweet announcing your newly published blog post.

Most Windows pc’s should be able to run Writer ( system requirements ) so go and download it and try it for yourself.