Yet another Microsoft tool which doesn’t look all that bad at first sight! Windows Live Writer is a somewhat like a blog-enabled wordprocessing software. The interface is intuitive and I have yet to see an easier setup: Enter your blog’s URL, username and password (you may want to create a dedicated ‘author’ user just in case….) and off you go: Live writer will detect you’re using wordpress and find all necessary settings automagically.
Working with Live Writer reveals some major drawbacks right at the first post: while picture handling basically works OK’ish (e.g. pictures are resampled if you scale them — no feeble-minded scaling with height/width tags), the tool cannot left/right align pictures nor can you add hyperlinks to pictures (WTF?) and the picture upload doesn’t follow the (configurable) wordpress scheme (the pictures end up in strange ‘livewriter’ sub-sub-sub-folders.
You can however open and edit older posts from the blog and categories seem to be fully supported — but that’s about it.
So, if you don’t fancy the wordpress built-in ‘visual rich text editor’ you might want to give this tool a try, although I’d strongly advise against opening existing posts which are too complex or trying to blog with hyperlinked and/or aligned pictures in a post.
And as you probably need to do some final ‘finetuning’ online anyway I personally don’t really see the point in using this tool. Sorry, Redmond.
