To increase my blogging productivity. I just download Microsoft Live Writer. According to man blogger. This new comer seems to be the best tools out there for blogger like me. I have more than 4 different blog to post. The writer claims to be compatible with Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many other weblog services.
Download Windows Live Writer and installation of Windows Live Writer is pretty easy and straight forward. Setup the new blog account with it is also easy. The transparent installation interface look cool but not really necessary. I guess it’s good for Window Vista.
First time opening the writer, I thought I am opening a messenger window. It look just like Windows Live’s default blue theme. Setting up is easy. Open new account and enter the blog URL, login and password, it will automatically recognize the blog type and platform running it.
When setting up the blog, it also check what features are available with your blog. However, I find it useless. For example, for File upload, I cannot really use it since I can’t upload images to my wordpress upload directory. And I don’t even have clue about comment policy, and author field. There is no such field in the editor for me to enter my name.
It also allow you to choose to upload the image to your server or FTP to your third party sites. When you insert the image, it allows to add drop shadow, resize and rotation. This is convenient. However, the quality for resizing doesn’t seem good enough. It’s getting really blurry. The text editing tool just like word document with limited editing options. I could not use this upload features for my WordPress blog for some reason. I guess WordPress do not allow to publish images though third party tools. So I have to upload to AOL pictures and copy the image links and post them here.
One thing is really bothering me. Whenever I press the return key, it just generate a <p> tag to wrap the paragraph. This is annoying. I am a <br> person. It’s just make me feel that the code it generates is not clean. Just like the FrontPage or Office Word. It inserts a bunch crap code to take the space.
It also allows me to add category and tag. However, it doesn’t allow me to add custom keywords and description for meta tag, which is now available in the WordPress with Add Meta Tags plug-in. Windows Live Writer does support some third party plug-in. However, I have not found the plug in for meta tag at the moment of this writing. One it does do that other blog software don’t do is to insert Windows Live Map. Which allows you to embedded the map into your blog. I did not use it, because I don’t know what to do with the map. In order words, what do I show a map for? It does all ow you to insert tag for technorati at the end of the post or anywhere in the post.
Overall the software is cool and useful for me to group different blog post. However, when I have more than two windows opened the same time, and with real-time spell check enabled, my CUP usage is going crazy. It slows down my entire PC. I close all of the running application and still get 70% CPU usage and 94MB memory usage.
Technorati Tags: Blog, windows live writer, review, plug-in, wordpress
Thanks for the feedback.
> When setting up the blog, it also check what features are available with your blog. However, I find it useless.
This panel is mainly for debugging purposes. The algorithm we use to figure out what capabilities your blog has is complicated, so this is an easy way for support people to figure out whether a feature should be showing or not (we try to hide features that are not supported by your blog).
> For example, for File upload, I cannot really use it since I can’t upload images to my wordpress upload directory.
This could be due to a PHP bug that we’ve seen on some configurations. Writer generally works fine when uploading images to WordPress. E-mail me and I can help you get to the bottom of this.
> And I don’t even have clue about comment policy, and author field. There is no such field in the editor for me to enter my name.
Comment policy and author are available at the bottom of the screen. Next to “Set Categories” and “Set Publish Date” there’s a little up-arrow, which reveals more post options.
> However, the quality for resizing doesn’t seem good enough. It’s getting really blurry.
Yes, we have an image processing bug that’s causing that. It will be fixed in the next release.
> One thing is really bothering me. Whenever I press the return key, it just generate a tag to wrap the paragraph. This is annoying. I am a person. It’s just make me feel that the code it generates is not clean. Just like the FrontPage or Office Word. It inserts a bunch crap code to take the space.
Actually most web standards advocates consider tags to be much more semantically correct for separating paragraphs than ; that’s why we do it. If what you actually mean is , you can use Shift+Enter.
> It also allows me to add category and tag. However, it doesn’t allow me to add custom keywords and description for meta tag
I believe you can do this by filling in the Excerpt and Keyword fields. These are in the same panel as comment policy and author (see above).
> However, when I have more than two windows opened the same time, and with real-time spell check enabled, my CUP usage is going crazy. It slows down my entire PC. I close all of the running application and still get 70% CPU usage and 94MB memory usage.
That must be a bug–we have never seen that before. Unless the CPU usage is coming from svchost.exe, not WindowsLiveWriter.exe. If it’s the former, the workaround is to go into services control panel and disable the Windows Live Setup Service. If it’s the latter, can you please e-mail me?
Thanks again for the feedback–it’s how we get better!