live writer

Carrying on from last night, I was going to tell you about Wave 3 of Windows Live Writer.  Microsoft has recently released a whole slew of their Live apps.  Writer and Photo Gallery are both programs that I use on a regular basis, and I’ll give you a quick overview of Writer here.  Writer is a cut-down word processing package that is used only to create and edit blog posts.  It does this with a range of different user interface styles, and it works with your blog’s theme to handle styles.

There are three different modes of editing and writing posts – one each with and without your blog’s theme, and one raw mode.  Editing and composing with your theme applied is as close as you can get to WYSIWYG composition as I have ever seen.  The fonts are rendered as you would see them on your web page, and the HTML elements are mostly perfect.  I say mostly only because some of the options aren’t completely compatible with my theme.  For example if you right align a paragraph then you end up with a perfectly normal html <p align=”right”> tag at the start of the paragraph.  However, that doesn’t work properly with XHTML where all of the decorative layout is done using CSS.  I could potentially change the mark-up to transitional XHTML 1.0, but that seems a little excessive just to me.  In all fairness I don’t ever actually align my paragraphs to the right anyway, so it really makes no difference. 

Where there is a slight issue that does make a difference though is in how images are posted.  You can insert pictures into your blog posts and they work perfectly.  Writer however doesn’t allow easy justification of those images.  For example if I want to align an image to the right then it automatically adds align=”right” to the image tag and that isn’t XHTML 1.1 compatible.  So I have to manually edit the mark-up before posting to use my method of getting an image to align on the right – I add class=”photoright” to the tag and strip out the alignment before posting.  Its clumsy but it works.  Writer also uploads a couple of different versions of the images to your blog.  So, if you click on the image to the right of this paragraph, you will see a larger version of the same image.  That one will be the original sized screen capture that I took, while you only see a small thumbnail on this page.  It saves bandwidth and makes it easier for the author as you don’t need to resize images manually before posting them to your blog. That one feature was enough to get me to switch in the first place, and it has only gotten better over the subsequent versions.

One of the neater functions of Writer is the Preview Mode.  This mode takes your post and puts it into the context of the rest of your blog as you would see it if you had browsed to it.  I’d do a screenshot but there’s no point really.  If you’re reading this post through a web browser as opposed to an RSS reader then you’d see exactly what I see when looking at this post in Preview Mode. There’s a bunch of other fun things in there too, such as an on-screen word-counter for those who get paid by the word, and the ability to save drafts either locally or straight to a blog (if that’s supported).  Naturally enough you can also embed a variety of objects in a blog post. Writer makes it easy to embed images, maps, Technorati tags and videos of many different formats.  It is also extensible with plug ins that can be downloaded or written from scratch should you have the desire.

All in all I have to say that its well worth taking a look at.  The newest version, in addition to being slightly faster and looking better in Windows, is also much more robust. Despite my previous reports about having technical problems getting it setup correctly with BlogEngine.Net, once I had it up and running the issues evaporated.  I have also been in contact with someone from Microsoft who has assured me that they have the problem fixed and will post a hot fix soon.