Well, at least I won’t be using it to write my posts and pages anymore. I’ve used a combination of ScribeFire and the WordPress dashboard to craft my posts. At the moment, I’m compiling my post via Windows Live Writer! I should have made the switch sooner. But man, this program rocks! It handles like any other Office program which is great because the feeling of familiarity is there (I’ve had to work with Word a lot throughout school).
Features
Free: I like free. Do you like free? I think I’m getting the bang for the buck here.
Scheduled Posting: Yes, you can do that on WordPress as well. But you’d have to be logged in to your WordPress account. With WLW, I don’t even have to have my browser open anymore.
Inserts: My current WordPress is setup in such a way where I could not use the WYSIWYG editor on WordPress itself or else it would break my blog. As a result, I’ve had to hand code everything in HTML. Now there’s a big time pain. I can insert links, pictures, tables, videos, and Wikipedia links with relative ease.
Adaptable: WLW works with many different blog services. Among the most notable includes WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and so on. Oh, if you have more than one blog, it can handle multiple accounts simultaneously.
Spell check: I still have to proofread my post. But at least it’s quicker now and I don’t have to guess how to spell a word properly. A simple right click and a list of suggestions can fix that.
Previews: What this does is it allows you to download your style. Therefore when you preview it, you can see how it looks formatted as if it were on your own blog.
Plugins: You can expand and customize WLW with different features based on your tastes. Right now, I’m using Insert Video, Text Template, and Insert Wikipedia Link.
Mac Users
For my MacBook, I’m going to give ecto a spin. This one came highly recommended to me courtesy of Siha.
On a side note to feral tanks
When you’re about to tank Azgalor, please don’t shift to Cat form when he’s under 5 yards away from you.
Our Main Tank did just that yesterday and he exploded. I had iTunes open with the Benny Hill theme queued. Talk about timing.
sounds interesting… 🙂 I know Darren Rowse at Problogger uses Ecto – he’s always mentioning it in his “what I use” posts.
glad you’ve found something that works well for ya!
Gonna try it myself, thanks for the push:) I have 2 blogs, my wp, and my lj…and another wp that I rarely use.
WLW is great. Being using it for my site for the last four months and just love it. One of my favorite features is the ftp image upload. Before, I had to host the pics via photobucket or manually write the url on WP; now, after setting up the FTP link, the pictures are automatically saved to a designated folder on my server.
I actually use MarsEdit myself, for blogging on a Mac. Ecto is good too, though, don’t get me wrong – I’ve just used MarsEdit for a long time, and been very happy with it. 🙂
Dumbass feral tank…
lol you sold your soul and are using a Microsoft program 🙂
Trying it out! I can’t seem to figure out how to center images that I stick in though? Paragraph? Right clicking? Image options? /boggle
Pellegri: I can’t help but wonder if image alignment is tied directly to your CSS in some fashion. I’ve experienced cases before where no matter how many “align” tags I’ve used on my images, they would always align left.
But then I checked into the CSS. Sure enough, all images were hard wired to be left aligned. I removed that line and I was able to left, center, or right align it.
I don’t know if that might be the problem, but it’s certainly one avenue to explore. I haven’t completely played around with WLW as much as I’ve wanted to yet.
Perhaps someone else can shed some light on this issue. Any takers?