For all those bloggers out there, there are various options which are available to you like Blogger, WordPress, Livejournal etc. These all feature online editors which allow you rich editing on their website. The limitation with these is your requirement to be connected to the web. The moment you get offline/ your browser hangs (Three cheers for IE for that) you are completely stranded (I don’t trust the save draft feature). And guess what a software from Microsoft actually comes to your rescue…
Microsoft Live Writer features an easy to use word-like editor which can be downloaded from http://get.live.com/writer/overview.
It allows connection to major blogging sites like WordPress, Blogger, Livejournal. Its quite easy and intuitive for a first time user and asks for the URL of the website along with the username and the password. Once you provide it that you are good to go.
It allows you options to save local drafts of your blog, post draft to your weblog, post draft to edit online (quite a handy feature) and of course to publish the whole weblog online. In addition you can of course preview while you are typing in how the real thing is going to look.
MLW – Microsoft Live Writer allows you to insert links, pictures, videos and tags like you were using a Word like editor as I have shown below.
All in all I think Microsoft has come up with a really good software to allow you to blog offline and if you are like me create articles before hand and publish it later. I would however like a scheduler feature here to post my blog online automatically. However it is a freeware and being that it just shines in what its supposed to do and it gets 5 stars from me.
Filed under: Freeware, Productivity, Utility Application | Tagged: Blogging, Freeware, Windows Live Writer |
Applications that increase your productivity 
You can actually set the date/time for the post to the future (on the bottom of the screen) and WordPress.com will hold it until that time comes. This doesn’t work with all blog services but it does with many of them, including WordPress.
Hope this helps!
Thanks joe for posting this…
For those reading this the post above is by Joe one of the developers working on WLW…
I dont blog but this software looks really nifty. kinda makes you want to start your own blog if keeping it up is this convenient…Really interesting post ..
Nice blog…Really informative article. Would recommend you check out Blogjet. Its not free but comes with a ton of features and is a favorite amongst many..
http://www.codingrobots.com/blogjet/