Windows Live Writer

After seeing that the new WordPress 2.3.1 release had tagging support in for Windows Live Writer, I was curious as to what Live Writer actually was. Turns out it is a desktop application for authoring blog posts that can be published to a variety of different blogs, including WordPress.

I thought I’d download it and give it a go. So I’ve been using it for, well, since I started writing this post.

If you allow it, it will take a look at the theme you are using so you can author your posts and view them styles as they would appear on the blog. You can also view in a plain layout, view the html source, or preview the post how it’s going to look in you blog, as mentioned above.
Just on a side note about the HTML, Microsoft don’t tend to have a good history of creating HTML editors that actually put out good code. It seems they’re learning from their past mistakes, for now at least, the code produced here is pretty good.

Tags are added as Keywords in the properties box of a post as well as choosing the categories and other settings for the post.

Publishing is straight forward using the aptly titled Publish button on the toolbar. This will send the post off to your blog and publish it. You also have options for saving the draft locally or publishing the post as draft to your blog.

First impressions are good, I don’t totally see the reasons yet for having something like this, unless you have multiple blogs in which case it would save time logging into different blogs to post. I’m sure I’ll see other benefits after I’ve used it a while.