About a month ago, Microsoft released the beta version of their Windows Live Writer, a blogging editor that can be used with existing blogs as well as with Microsoft’s own blogging service, Windows Live Spaces. I have downloaded a copy of it, installed it, and this post is being written with it. Because I have written a part of only one paragraph with it that means I am just at the starting point of playing with the program, so any significant evaluation will have to wait until I’ve used it more extensively. However, I can say the installation and setup of my blog with it went smoothly and without incident.
One thing that led me to want to test this program out was this screencast that I watched yesterday. I had also read Paul Stamatiou’s review of it for the second time. Since I subscribe to Paul’s RSS feed, I had read this review when he first published it, but because I wasn’t yet ready to experiment with WLW at the time, I hadn’t followed his recommendation to take it for a spin … until now.
One of the features that I’m interested in seeing in action is how WLW handles images. According to both the screencast I mentioned earlier and the WLW web site, handling photos is easy with Live Writer and you have considerable flexibility and control over how they appear on your blog post.
So without further ado, I’ve now inserted this picture of a sign in my neighborhood so that I can see how it is handled when I publish this post. I’ve always liked the name of this pet service, perhaps because I’ve always been fond of puns and because I grew up listening to Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sing “Happy Trails to You” at the end of their TV show. You’ll notice that I’ve added the so-called “photopaper” border to it, which makes the digital image look a bit more like an “old school” photograph. A feature I like about inserting images with this editor is that you can specify how the text wraps (or not) around the picture and the amount of margin between the image and the text.
Well the final test of this tool for the moment will be to see how it handles publishing this post to my blog. So the only way to test that is to publish it and see what happens.