Tool To Create Compelling Blog Posts Easily
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Blogging as a means of sharing information, knowledge and insight has grown a lot in recent years. While some blog purely as hobby, others make their living out of it. Unfortunately, bloggers have to work with rudimentary tools to compose their blog posts and there are not many tools which easily integrated with their blogging platform to provide them a means of creating rich posts.
Microsoft has come up with Windows Live Writer, a windows based desktop application that allows you to compose rich blog posts using your own blog service (WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal etc.). Although still in beta, the tool is very robust and boasts of lot of out-of-the-box features.
(Click on the images to enlarge)
Windows Live Writer
Options in Windows Live Writer
Publishing options in Windows Live Writer
Some of the important features are listed below:
- Compatibility: Writer works with most of the popular weblogs including WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad etc. They are continuously adding support for more and more weblogs.
- WYSIWYG Authoring: It understands your site post template (headings, fonts, colors, background images, paragraph spacing, block quotes etc.) and lets you work with your posts with the same styles.
- Image Publishing: It makes the work of inserting, customizing and uploading photos to your blog an easy smooth process.
- Map Publishing: It allows you to insert a Windows Live Local map directly into a post. Plenty of customization to the map can be done directly inside the Writer (road, aerial or bird’s eye view, adding pushpins etc.)
- Writer SDK: SDK allows developers to extend the functionality provided by the Writer. It is open to public and people have contributed some nice plugins (also called extensions) for Writer. The plugins page can be found here.
Some really nice extensions are:
- Blog this for FireFox/IE: Adds a button to Firefox/IE and let you blog the whole page or snippets directly from the web browser.
- Insert Video: Allows you to insert a video from MSN SoapBox, Google Video, YouTube, MySpace Video, Yahoo! Video and now muveeMix videos.
- Flicks4Writer: Allows you to interact with Flickr.
Windows Live Writer has extensive features to help you enhance your blogging experience. Its open API allows developers to extend the functionality to provide support for more tools and provide integration with other third party tools.
Eric Cherng has a very good tutorial on Getting started with Windows Live Writer. Keyvan Nayyeri has a nice post on How to write a Windows Live Writer Plugin using C#. Paul Stamatiou takes a pretty comprehensive look at Windows Live Writer in his post here.
Some other editors are : RocketPost, Performancing for Firefox
Update: BlogDesk is another free tool which has nice features. It does not support Blogger though.[Thanks gursesl]
Upcoming version of Windows Live Writer has been made available on the German Live Writer community. Please read this post discussing the same.
Technorati Tags: Windows - Live - Writer, - Plugins, - Extensions, - Insert - Video, - Blog, - Blogging - Tool, - Microsoft, - WordPress, - Blogger
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