Scoop’s Views

Windows Live Writer Makes Blogging Easier!

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft has hit the nail on the head with one of its latest products: Windows Live Writer, part of the Windows Live services.

With Windows Live Writer, Microsoft has made blogging even easier and faster for folks. Sure, there was the tool that allowed you to create a blog entry from Microsoft Word, but that required folks to have Word. You could also simply login to the Web site of the blogging service, create your blog entry, and save it to your blog. But with Windows Live Writer, things are even easier than that!

To create a new blog entry, you first have to have Windows Live installed on your computer. Once you’ve done that, install the Writer component, and a new button with an open book and pencil will appear in your Live toolbar. The words, Blog It, also appear there, so it’s really hard to now know which button is the shortcut to launching Writer.

When you fire up Windows Live Writer, it presents a simple What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor interface. It looks similar to a word processor, in some respects.

If you look on the right-hand side of the screenshot, you will notice links to:

• Insert Link…
• Insert Picture…
• Insert Tags…
• Insert Map…

Want to add a link to your blog without coding it all by hand, including adding the alternate title for links? That’s the one thing I always found obscenely stupid that most blogging services left out: a way to add the title to links. Well, in Windows Live Writer, it’s built in with the Insert Link feature. When you enter the URL you want to link to, there’s a field for the title. It comes in handy for those of us who actually use the feature.

All the links are handy tools. When I played with the Insert Picture link, I was impressed the first time. It allows you to watermark images. See the screenshot about. The "Scoop0901" watermark over the image was created with the click of a button and typing the content for the watermark. The watermark is even applied to the actual image, not only the thumbnail seen here in the posting. If you have Windows Live Writer set up to FTP images, it will even upload the images you want to your image directory when you post the blog entry. Yes, there are options, such as the ability to alter the color of the photo, as well as several other features, but check them out for yourself if you are interested.

Map for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington DC

Are you going to blog about a meeting for a candidate seeking office in your area? Why not post a map to the meeting so people can find their way to the location quickly and easily? With Windows Live Writer, it’s simple. Again, click the link for Insert Map, type in the address and city where the meeting will be held, and voila!, the map is generated in an instant. Simply add your comments about the location. In this instance, I plugged in the address of the map, which was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington DC. It used to be the most-famous address in the United States: It’s the White House. If you care to write letters to those occupying the White House, simply put the name of the occupant, along with the address, and it will be sorted, sifted, and, if the person’s high enough in the hierarchy of monotony and deniability, their assistant or team of assistants will read and reply to your mail.

Well, there you have it. A great tool, stable as far as I’ve seen so far, and I’ve used it for blogging on several sites, as well as playing with it simply to try crashing it, and I haven’t had it crash yet. Now, for a Microsoft beta product, that’s really saying something! Then again, the development team is being led by Mr. Allaire, the guy who helped create ColdFusion, among other things. He eventually sold off his company to Macromedia. Now he’s been hired by Microsoft to work on Windows Live Writer, so it seems development for this product is still in its early stages, but offers a lot of potential for the future.