August 14, 2006
@ 07:24 PM

I've been late to blog about this because I was out on vacation but better late than never. J.J. Allaire (yes, that one) has a blog post entitled Introducing Windows Live Writer which announces Microsoft's desktop blogging tool called Windows Live Writer. He writes

Introducing Windows Live Writer

Welcome to the Windows Live Writer team blog! We are excited to announce that the Beta version of Windows Live Writer is available for download today.

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service. Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone. Writer has lots of features which we hope make for a better blogging experience. Some of the ones we are most excited about include:

WYSIWYG Authoring

 The first thing to notice about Writer is that it enables true WYSIWYG blog authoring. You can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it. Writer knows the styles of your blog such as headings, fonts, colors, background images, paragraph spacing, margins and block quotes and enables you to edit your post using these styles. ...

Photo Publishing

Writer makes inserting, customizing, and uploading photos to your blog a snap. You can insert a photo into your post by browsing image thumbnails through the “Insert Picture” dialog or by copying and pasting from a web page...Photos can be either uploaded directly to your weblog provider (if they support the newMediaObject API) or to an FTP server.

Writer SDK

 Already thinking of other cool stuff you want to insert into your blog? Good!

The Windows Live Writer SDK allows developers to extend the capabilities of Writer to publish additional content types. Examples of content types that can be added include:

  1. Images from online photo publishing sites
  2. Embedded video or audio players
  3. Product thumbnails and/or links from e-commerce sites
  4. Tags from tagging services

This is one project I've been dying to blog about for months. Since I was responsible for the blogging and the upcoming photo publishing APIs for Windows Live Spaces, I've spent the last couple of weeks working with the team to make sure that the user experience when using Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Spaces is great. I'd like to hear if you think we've done a good job.

PS: The application is not only chuck full of features but is also very extensible. Tim Heuer has already written plugins to enable integration with Flickr and added tagging support. If you are a developer, you should also download the SDK and see what extensions you can hack into the app.


 

Monday, 14 August 2006 21:54:16 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Thanks for the pointer to Tim Heuer's forthcoming plug-ins for Technorati tags and Flickr images. These were two of my requests when I wrote the brief review of WLW and Blogger today: http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/windows-live-writer-beta-blogger-test.html

--rj
Tuesday, 15 August 2006 11:08:00 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Does Windows Live Spaces support APP (yet)?
Tuesday, 15 August 2006 16:27:31 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
The is a way to configure Blog This support in RSS Bandit to use WLW?
Tuesday, 15 August 2006 19:40:09 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Danny,
It doesn't.

Lorenzo,
Not at the current time.
Wednesday, 16 August 2006 00:32:06 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
:-(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
Saturday, 19 August 2006 18:37:30 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
WLW (beta) definitely outperforms Writely (beta) when WYSIWYG editing Blogger entires. See the review of Writely (attempting to act) as a blog editor at http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/writely-beta-finally-opens-with-thud.html.
Monday, 21 August 2006 10:28:12 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Brilliant. Just brilliant. I can say for a fact that it works seamlessly with wordpress and the hosted wordpress service, wordpress.com.

My only gripe is the RIDICULOUS folder structure it imposes for uploads!!
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