Musings of a Marketing Maven

Blog­gers who pre­fer WYSIWYG writ­ing and edit­ing tools will appre­ci­ate Win­dows Live Writer. It’s a desk­top appli­ca­tion that lets you com­pose new entries when offline, pre­view the post as it will look online, and then upload it to wher­ever your blog is being hosted.

Although no doubt opti­mized for Win­dows Live Spaces (Microsoft’s blog host­ing world), it’s also com­pat­i­ble with Word­Press, Blog­ger and other com­mon blog­ging tools.

I’ve been using it with Word­Press, and so far, it’s worked like a charm.

Did I men­tion it’s free?

Why I Like Win­dows Live Writer

1. When com­pos­ing entries that require more thought (and there­fore more time), my expe­ri­ence sug­gests an offline tool can be more reli­able than one that requires a per­sis­tent con­nec­tion to the remote server. See what hap­pens if you have a server time-out while com­pos­ing online.… Before switch­ing to Live Writer, I lost a post or two before I was ready to pub­lish them.
2. The UI is cleaner and bet­ter suited to com­pos­ing blog entries than the tool that’s sup­plied by Word­Press. Live Writer’s WYSIWYG mode works really well.
3. Com­pos­ing offline is much faster and more respon­sive than using an online tool.
4. It’s com­pat­i­ble with the tag­ging sys­tem used by my remotely hosted blog, so I can tag and cat­e­go­rize entries even while work­ing offline.
5. It’s com­pat­i­ble with the style sheets used by the remote blog, so local pre­view­ing pro­vides a sur­pris­ingly accu­rate sense of what the blog entry will look like when posted to the remote server.

What I Don’t Like About Live Writer

It doesn’t work on a Mac­in­tosh, unless:

• you have an Intel-based Mac
• and you run Win­dows XP or Vista on your Mac via Apple’s Boot Camp or a third-party vir­tu­al­iza­tion sys­tem, like Par­al­lels Desk­top for Mac.

And no — I haven’t tried it on an Intel-based Mac.

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