Live Writing on the Live Web

Along with my migration to Vista 64-bit, I decided to finally take Windows Live Writer for a spin.  I just used it to write my third guest post on [GAS], in which I analyze the analysis of David Sifry.

I can hear you now, “(groan) He’s gone over to the Dark Side.  First Vista, and now this?“

All things being equal, I’d prefer open-source over Microsoft products.  But I’d heard a lot of good things about WLW, and a few minor issues with BlogDesk were starting to annoy me.  Besides, it is freeware, even though it’s from the Empire.

WLW interfaces very smoothly with WordPress blogs, automatically pulling down the category list and the theme characteristics.

I especially like the Web Layout view, and the way that it incorporates your blog’s theme while editing, so you know just how your post will look before you publish it.  Here’s what this post looked like in Live Writer at this point in its construction:

Notice the large white area on the right.  That’s because my stylesheet reserves that margin for the sidebars.  Here’s the web preview:

Inserting images is easier than spilling paint.  You can either click “Insert Picture…” to browse for a file, or you can just paste one from the clipboard.  Either way, you get a nice set of options for text wrapping, margins, sizing, rotation, brightness, contrast, drop shadow, and effects.

The only source of frustration that I have discovered so far: after inserting an image and adjusting its settings, I couldn’t figure out where the text caret was positioned.  I tried clicking to the right of the image or beneath it, but I couldn’t get a caret to show up (presumably because there was no text there yet).  It turns out that if you click on the image itself, and then press right-arrow, the cursor will be positioned immediately following the image.  That’s not too counter-intuitive, so maybe I just needed to take more fish oil this morning.

I did discover one very minor bug.  In the [GAS] theme, blockquotes are rendered iin a different text color than the main content.  After making a section of text into a blockquote by pressing the handy little button on the toolbar, I pressed Enter at the end of the paragraph and then pressed the button again to make the next paragraph non-blockquote.  When I started typing, the text color was still that of the blockquote instead of regular text.  However, if I undid that and typed a character before un-blockquoting it, then the text color reverted correctly.  I’m guessing that even if I hadn’t done that, the published result would have been OK, because the HTML source showed the blockquote ending at the right point.

WLW provides a nice tagging widget for several tagging services, and you can even add your own.  It’s limited, though, to embedding tags in the post as content.  In other words, I’m not sure how you could automatically interface it to Jerome’s Keywords, for instance, which stores its tags in the WordPress database.  Maybe a WordPress plugin could be developed to hook onto the publish event and look for specific HTML from which to generate the tags for Jerome’s.  I’ll have to look into that.

One thing that seems to be missing: templates.  You’d think that Microsoft, who did so much to promote templates with their Office products, would have included something like that concept here.  With BlogDesk, I had two simple templates: one for Chip’s Tips (with the “Give me the code!” button) and another for my “Chipping the web” posts (with the standard graphic).  I suppose I could save both of those as drafts in WLW and just copy/paste that content into new posts.

Anyway, so far, using my patented “Chip’s hip or kip” rating system, the needle is leaning about 60 degrees towards “hip” — to be updated as future experience warrants.