14 August 2006 in Blogging, Microsoft | Comments enabled

I’ve always preferred a blend of desktop applications and online content when working with anything that uses the Internet. That’s why I’ve usually made my blog posts using tools to W.Blogger, however recently W.Blogger seems to have disappeared (hence the lack of a link) so I haven’t been able to let people know about what a great tool it was for composing new blog entries offline and then pushing them up to my website.

Thankfully a better tool has become available – Windows Live Writer. Now I was as surprised as anyone that the tool was designed not to only support Live Spaces but also many other blogging platforms (WordPress, DasBlog, Community Server Blogs and more). So I’ve wired it up to compose this entry and I’ll keep testing it out for a while. So far it seems much more slick than W.Blogger and it has considerably better preview/style integration.

Even more exciting is that Microsoft have created an API for the publishing tool to allow developers to create their own plugins (which I assume means new blog providers, extra formatting tools etc). It already has support for everything you would expect – spell checking, category support, post management etc.

Overall this tool looks great for a first beta. I really look forward to seeing what people do to extend the capabilities of it to make it truly great.

Windows Live Writer Website

Download Windows Live Writer

- JD