I just finished installing Windows Live Writer, which is a desktop blog editor, and am currently writing this blog with it. From what I see so far, it seems as if this is exactly what I’ve been looking for ever since I started this site.
I use WordPress, which I have been very impressed with overall. However, the built in WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor just does not cut it. There are several missing features, such as background and foreground colors, text size, subscript, etc. Not only that, but it completely screws up my embedded YouTube videos by changes all my <embed> tags into <ibed> for some reason, along with other things. In order to get them to show up correctly, I have to embed the video, then immediately publish it. Even if I try to edit it, my code is screwed up and the video no longer works.
So, I have tried every plugin imaginable. Advanced WYSIWYG editor, FCKEditor, etc. I’ve constantly had to switch between them as I’ve needed different features for several different posts. FCKEditor in particular gave me problems because it was displayed simultaneously with the built-in WYSIWYG editor (which I just barely managed to fix, by the way…I’ll have to try it out more after this). I’ve tried upwards of four different desktop editors as well. The preview of my post never looked the same as it did after it was published. And most of them don’t offer a means of posting only a draft. So I ended up going back to the original online editor for all my tasks. And I don’t really enjoy using HTML tags for everything; yes, I’m a software engineer, but when I’m writing, I’d rather see it laid out exactly the way it will look.
Enter Windows Live Writer. As you can see in this screenshot, Writer grabs my CSS styles from my web site and allows me to write my post in the context of the actual layout.
Whenever I choose, I can also go to the web preview view and see the entire page exactly the way it will appear once it’s posted. Here is a screenshot of the preview.
Likes:
- Plugin support!
- Previews look great
- The image insertion works flawlessly so far. You can even add image effects or edit the image directly.
- Spell checker works great
- Saving a draft locally works like a charm, a name is automatically chosen based on the post title
- Tags are easily added with pre-defined formats for many well-known blog index sites (like Technorati)
- A draft of your post can be saved on your blog
Dislikes:
- Previews use IE, so any differences when running firefox will not be seen
- There is no ‘more’ tag, subscript, or superscript functions in the editor. However, issues with the ‘more’ tag can be resolved using the ‘Text Template’ plugin, where you can customize snippets of commonly used HTML.
- Cannot easily update the hyperlink title for images (I use this extensively for the Lightbox Javascript plugin for image previews)
This software is currently in beta stage, so I imagine that even more features will be added before its final release.
I have obviously not used this tool long enough to provide a long-term analysis. I can say, however, that so far this is the absolute best WYSIWYG desktop blog editor that I have used and I highly recommend you give it a try. Plus, it seems easy enough to use for the technically challenged among us.
