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August 18, 2006
Why Terry loves Live Writer
Although this appears to be posted by CW, it's actually from Terry Lane, who's forgotten his Movable Type password, but has been smitten with love for Microsoft Live Writer, and wants to tell the world about it ...
Bleeding Edge and our companion blog, dpexpert.com.au use the Movable Type blogging software which is OK but which has an absurdly cumbersome interface for creating new entries. Keeping the blogs up to date with regular entries is a pain in the posterior.
Images must be uploaded one at a time and the link copied and pasted into the entry text. Alignment -- left, centre, right -- must be done by adding code by hand. Formatting text -- bold, italics etc -- can't be done with the usual Ctrl-B or Ctrl-I. And the miserable little text entry screen involves constant scrolling to get to edit points. It is truly horrible.
Thank Gates for Windows Live Writer! WLW works like a mini-Word. All the familiar keyboard shortcuts work. Pictures can be dragged and dropped and resized and aligned with the mouse. Adding links is a breeze. And all without any scrolling.
Live Writer is truly WYSIWYG, creating the entry before your very eyes based on the layout it has retrieved from your own blog! It knows everything about fonts, type size, column width and categories because it has acquired the specs from your own blog. Very clever.
Live Writer works with all the popular blog software as well as linking to a Microsoft blog service.
The only painful thing about Live Writer is making the initial connection. It insisted that the user name and password it was being given were incorrect. It turned out that an API password has to be set in Movable Type's user profile page and that is the password to be given to Live Writer. The normal password for access to the editing interface will not work.
It took about three hours and much profanity to get to the point where the connection was opened, but once opened it works like a dream. 1000 thanks Mr Gates. Why are you being so helpful and generous? We are waiting for the catch!
Posted by cw at August 18, 2006 02:14 PM
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Comments
It works beautifully with Wordpress - the only issue I had was that when you first set it up to suck down your styles, it creates a temporary post which "Bloglines" managed to pick up and so I've had a whole heap of 404's from people trying to get to it. Otherwise though, it's a little ripper.
(I think the catch is that there's not a snowball's chance in hell that there'll ever be a Mac/Linux version, and Microsoft badly needs some blog press that isn't to do with how much better Macs are)
Posted by: Geoff at August 18, 2006 02:46 PM
Now only if we could get an API key for the sub accounts here on BE, I wouldn't have to cut and paste from Windows Live Writer 'source code view' over into the 'Post New Entry' Field here on BE.
Posted by: Stephen ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://bleedingedge.com.au/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 18, 2006 04:12 PM
Stephen, what the man says works. You just need to get to your profile and set up a password for the API access in addition to the normal browser access password. I've yet to post with it but the set up wizard in Live Writer does not complain if you do this.
Posted by: anandasim at August 19, 2006 11:57 AM
Another good 3rd-party blogging software is ecto - particularly for OSX.
You can use rich text editing or swap to HTML, use preset codes, link in with other web services etc.
It is highly customisable and is well worth the small fee for a license.
Posted by: Timmy B at August 20, 2006 01:21 PM
Typical of MS products, Live Writer insists on being used with the latest Windows only. I tried installing it on Windows 2000 - yes, I know it's end-of-life and all, but the guts are similar to Windows XP - but Live Writer couldn't run the setup wizard successfully. Sure, third-party products do have design limitations, but by virtua of being third party, they do not have the luxury of insisting that only the latest Windows with the latest libraries are requisite infrastructure.
Posted by: anandasim at August 21, 2006 11:38 AM