There is a lot of buzz around Windows Live Writer.  I Might as well throw my two cents into the fray.  Keep in mind that I do understand this is a beta.

The Good

  • It uses the paragraph tag <p> around your paragraphs rather than <br /> tags.
  • Keyboard shortcuts for switching views.
  • Integrates your blog’s style when previewing.  This is an impressive feature.  When I preview the post I am working on, it displays the post as if it was posted on my site.  I have seen a temporary blog post with the message This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (c3eaf4ab-0941-4881-9d17-d4f62bde069e)  in a few blogs related to obtaining a blog’s style. My guess is that Windows Live Writer posts to the blog, then deletes the post.  It takes a diff to figure out what changed.  That’s just my guess.
  • When adding a link, it has a field for the rel tag.  Nice!
  • It handles my unusual FTP setup using an FTP virtual directory. Not every tool deals with that correctly.
  • Inserting images allows you to apply a few simple effects. Very neat!
  • Support for Really Simple Discovery (RSD).  I just added RSD to Subtext.
  • Plugins!

The Needs Improvement

Since this is a beta, I didn’t feel right calling it “The Bad”.

  • Doesn’t let you specify the title attribute of a tag.
  • Inserts   all over the place as you edit text.
  • What key do I hit to Find Next?
  • No Find and Replace? Really?
  • Be nice to have HTML highlighting in the HTML View.
  • If I markup a word with the <code> tag, then cut and paste that word elsewhere in the Normal view, it marks up the pasted word with the font tag rather than using the underlying tag.

The Wish

  • Using typographic characters for singe quotes and double quotes ala MS Word.
  • Integration with CSS styles from the blog. Be nice to have a pulldown for various CSS classes.
  • Configurable shortcuts. I use the <acronym /> and <code /> tag all the time and have shortcuts for these configured in w.bloggar.

All in all, I really like it so far.  It has a nice look and feel to it and if they iron out a lot of these kinks, this may be the one to beat.

Unfortunately, this may cause some delays in Subtext 1.9 unless I can fight off the vicious urge to write some Microformat plugins. Why must these people introduce such interesting toys into my life! Where will I find the time? ;)

Speaking of which, Tim Heuer already has written a couple of plugins. 

[Download Windows Live Writer]