13 Aug 2006

Windows Live Writer Beta

I caught wind of the Windows Live Writer beta from Major Nelson's blog. He wasn't kidding when he said that BlogJet users should check it out — it feels almost like a BlogJet clone. There are still some things that BlogJet does better, though. For example, I like how BlogJet automatically substitutes certain HTML entites, such as — and curly quotes, as you type, as well as its text substitution features (similar to Community Server's Text Parts, but built into the editor).

CS support in Live Writer is decent enough. It goes through the MetaWeblog API, much like every other WYSIWYG editor on the market. The application did make an attempt to download my style sheets from the web site, which would have been really cool if it had actually worked. Perhaps they could add a feature to allow you to add these manually. Live Writer also makes any pings after posting via the editor itself. BlogJet appears to go through its posting API, which CS does not support, so I have to ping manually.

Windows Live Writer appears to be shaping up really nicely. If they can catch up with BlogJet's feature set and add a few more perks, I might just make the switch.

This post was made (and updated) with Live Writer, of course.

[Update] After seeing Dave Burke's post on Live Writer and that his blog is apparently much less uppity than mine and downloaded his styles without a problem, I decided to give it another go. Worked wonderfully the second time, but unfortunately it appears to have some issues pulling images out of the CSS file. See for yourself:

I'm impressed with how well the preview works in terms of showing you how your layout will work in its final form. However, the lack of CSS image support (which may stem from the fact that my styles use relative paths) makes it too annoying to work in this mode all the time. Still very cool stuff. I look forward to seeing what else they have in store for us.

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Comments

pierro said:

hey there from germany, my english is not good, but i will   start a try for a quit helpcry : i found your post about windows_live_writer  here :

http://gtdwannabe.blogspot.com/2006/08/voices-are-forcing-me-to-try-windows.html

and my blogger palce is right here :

http://www.unsaludo.blogspot.com/   im not a big computer nose, you know . ..

ok - what im not understand  the interaction with a yahoo_geocitie

here is "mine"

http://de.geocities.com/pierro_berlin

when i upload a picture to my geocities account -

how can i get the same pic. over there my blogger acount  in mine particularly post ?  

AND one more - you post a question here :

http://www.rjdudley.com/blog/CommentView,guid,abfdc2e6-9396-410b-9ef9-382a8f732bd2.aspx

about posting a pic "with"  the CIWI´s  CS GALLERY MANAGER -

i start to try ot , but nothing happens  . . . . .

puh, i hope you understand what im write, and may bee you find something time for this

# August 23, 2006 @ 8:22 PM
NinjaFish said:

I'm not really familiar with how Blogger works. Community Server is the only weblog software that I have used. I'm also not familiar with Geocities. However, assuming that Geocities lets you link to images from a different site (I don't think that it does, but it might), you should be able to configure the Windows Live Writer FTP settings to upload to Geocities. Make sure that the "URL of image publishing folder" points to your Geocities account and not your Blogger account. If Geocities lets you link to images, then they should just appear on your blog, even though they're hosted somewhere else.

Since I don't have a Geocities account or a Blogger account, I can't really provide more details than that.

# August 24, 2006 @ 11:23 PM