Over the weekend, Dennis has been testing some new Enterprise Irregulars stuff, and he has been complaining about the HTML in my posts generated by Qumana and/or my Yahoo hosted implementation of WordPress. I’ve had a few issues on this myself, when stray HTML has made a particular post screw up the site. He wanted me to switch to Ecto for blog editing. Fine if I was on the Mac, but I’ve heard the Windows implementation isn’t up to much.
So I decided it was time to upset my friend Jon Husband and switch to something new. I haven’t got time to do any in depth evaluation, but Windows Live Writer seemed the obvious choice since I’d seen many positive reviews since it came out last year. The current beta version has some things that were missing when I first looked at it, like Technorati Tags and a plug in to pick up Flickr photographs.
Here is Masternewmedia.org’s demo, which gives you a good intro to the product’s capability.
My first impressions are very positive. It installed quickly, and easily picked up this blog. While you create a post you can view it in the standard WYSIWYG editor, in the style format of your blog, preview exactly what it will look like in situ, or view and edit the underlying HTML - very flexible. The Flickr plug in works really well, and the options for handling photos and graphics are very nice indeed. Very easy to resize, move things about and add nice effects. It has neat touches, like inserting a link picks up the URL history from your browser as you type. Everything is very comprehensive but still intuitive and the only thing I couldn’t work out, which was how to make a photograph a link, was quickly answered with a trawl through the forums. Microsoft seem to be taking this product seriously, and are aiming it at users on all of the available blogging platforms, rather than just MySpace or Live Spaces. There seems to be an active community, and the fact that it has a standard API means there are a growing number of plug-ins. So far, so very good.
