Windows Live Writer (WLW) is a visual blog editor for Windows. It integrates with most blogging platforms (WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, and others), allowing you to see how your posts will appear in your blog’s theme, even when you’re offline.
WLW isn’t just another text editor. As a former Notepad coder, I was drawn to WLW as I began to use more photos and embedded content in my WordPress blog. The accuracy of its visual representation and, as you’ll see below, the way it handles media is what’s made it so popular.
Check out some of the video clips and download the tool for free here.
The Technical Preview Has Many New Features
On June 2, Microsoft released a "Technical Preview" to Windows Live Writer. It’s somewhat of a beta release, but you can download it from Microsoft here. Note: this can likely be downloaded from anywhere, but this version is only available in US English. I can’t speak of its stability with your environment, but it’s been fine for me with Windows Vista and a WordPress 2.5 blog.
There were two types of updates in this release: those for traditional users of the product and those for developers who create WLW plug-ins. The following are the updates for traditional users; if you’d like to read about the features for developers, see the official information or Windows Live MVP Scott Lovegrove’s synopsis.
The following list is in order by what I see as having the most time-saving benefits of Windows Live Writer:
- Image Cropping—This was the feature WLW arguably needed most as cropping images is part of many people’s blogging workflow. Since the new release I’ve had much less use for processing images outside of WLW. (Note: this only works for images inserted from Insert > Picture. This is not available for photos pasted directly—but perhaps that will be changed before the final release.)
- Word Count —It’s easy to ramble when you’re blogging; I no longer need to copy and paste between WLW and Microsoft Word to see how unbearably long an article has grown since the word count can be calculated real time, as pictured below in the status bar.
- Border Options—Little aesthetic touches like the rounded corners pictured below can help with the professionalism and consistency of a blog. Having more options for the borders of images should be helpful for a lot of WLW users.
- Auto Linking – if you regularly link to articles when you type certain phrases then you can configure WLW to automatically perform this task. In the example below, whenever I type "working remotely," it will automatically hyperlink to the URL listed.
Some other updates worth noting include:
- Image tilting
- Better support for the GIF format (let’s just say working with GIFs was a little messy before)
- Automatic program update checking, as well as a Check for Updates option on the Help menu
- Ability to upload videos directly to MSN Soapbox (Microsoft’s video sharing community) from your hard disk and immediately embed them
- Automatic insertion of curly quotes, em-dashes, and other rich typographic characters (similar to Microsoft Word)
- A quick search box for assigning categories
- Tabs to switch between the source code, visual editor, and preview view
- Alignment commands now work on images (before they only worked with text)
Tweaks for Windows Live Writer
If you’re new to Windows Live Writer or never bothered to poke around within the options, here are a few tweaks to the settings that I’ve found helpful.
For all versions of Windows Live Writer:
- Tools > Options: Automatically save drafts… – this has gotten me out of trouble more than once (it saves your post automatically at a specified interval)
- Tools > Options: Open a new window for each post – this will save you time if you copy and paste between posts (though the Text Template plug-in described below is also helpful for this)
- Tools > Options: Remind me to add categories before publishing – if you use categories, then sometimes you’ll forget to set them. This warns you if no categories are set when you go to publish. There’s a similar checkbox for article tags, too
- [editing a picture] > Advanced > Default Picture Sizes – when you insert or paste an image, wouldn’t it be great if it automatically were the same width or height as the images in your other posts? For instance, maybe your full size images should all be 493 pixels wide and caption images 195 pixels? To set these options, click any image, select the Advanced tab within the task pane, and then click the icon of the ruler and drafting triangle.