Microsoft Windows Live Writer Beta

This post and the audiobook review before it were both composed using Windows Live Writer.  I thought I’d give it a try and it seems to be working fairly well, although there are still a few beta glitches.

I’m a long-time user of Blogjet, which is a terrific tool.  Blogjet imposes a few constraints in my blogging workflow, though.  It doesn’t integrate with Community Server, my blog server, as well as I would like and I can never get it to automatically upload image files to my FTP server with any consistency.  I also don’t like it’s limited text formatting capabilities – while adequate for plain blogging, I end up manually entering some HTML in many posts to make the formatting appear as I want it.  So far, it seems like Live Writer addresses all these concerns.

It appears that Microsoft intends to make this an extensible platform that will work with all blogging engines.  From what I read, it also seems like Microsoft intends to keep this as free software.  As I said, though, it’s beta and exhibits some beta-type problems.

Hey, Live Writer Team, why can’t I save and open draft posts from any location on my computer like I can with any Office app or with Blogjet?  Scrolling the post window is also sorta screwy.

Related posts:

1. Windows Live Writer Beta 2
2. My Windows Live Writer Wish List
3. Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon