I’m composing this post in Windows Live Writer, a novel experience indeed. Take a look at this post in a screenshot!

If you’re a writer and you deal with blogs, or you’re writing your book in blog format, Windows Live Writer is one tool you shouldn’t live without. I’m completely in love with it. Head over heels. There are absolutely no reasons for you to lose your blog post to a buggy internet connection again. While WordPress has an autosave feature, there are occasions when your internet connection dies (rare, but very common where i come from) when a good two thirds of my post just dissappears. And of course any good writer knows that the flow of ideas being cut off and interrupted simply puts you off from completing what you’ve started.

Features That Make Me Swoon

Apart from the inherent advantages of composing posts offline, Windows Live Writer has another big thing going for it: Ease Of Use.

The entire software is so straightforward and seamlessly integrated with my WordPress platform I’m actually finding it hard to believe this was made by Microsoft. Really, the interface and feature set is something we’ve come to expect from Apple (it rocks almost as much as iTunes!) and i’m just about jumping around with how easy it is to post, to insert pictures and maps and links and styling elements, and to actually see how my posts looks like in my blog in real time, since the program pulls my style sheets down and applies it to my words.

There’s even plugin functionality, where you get extended features for specific blog platforms released in a community-like page, (a lot like the WordPress blogging platform and their plugins). Is this even Microsoft we’re talking about?

Amazing.

Setting It Up

Is a total breeze. You enter the address of your blog, your username and password, and Windows Live Writer handles the rest, pulling your style sheets down, finding out what categories you have, and generally making sure everything you need while posting is available to you within the program.

Note: you do need the .Net framework to run Windows Live Writer, but this shouldn’t be a problem at all.

Possible Problems

I’ve only tried it with (this) WordPress blog, and my experiences with making work with Blogger differs considerably. I got various errors and i couldn’t post or put up labels. Then again it could be temporary, since i’ve not downloaded plugins that could make this piece of software rub well with Blogger, and i have to remind myself this is still a beta version.

Nevertheless, i’m happy with it. It works well, you get to insert Maps, Pictures from your hard drive, and everything from an easy to understand Word-like environment. It rocks? You betcha.

Download it here.