What Makes Live Writer an Awesome Blogging Tool

March 22, 2011 by Daniel Sharkov|

The following review is a guest article written by Hannah Katsman. Hannah shares her experience with Live Writer – a tool that makes it easy to write and edit blog posts without ever having to open WordPress or Blogger…

When I started using Live Writer over a year ago, I could take it or leave it. But since Live Writer’s recent upgrade, I use it nearly exclusively. When I’m forced to use WordPress, I want to kick the screen with frustration.

Live Writer is a free software program that comes bundled with other free tools from the “Windows Live” series including Moviemaker (also terrific). You can download the ones you like from Microsoft.

When you first open Live Writer, you’ll notice two important differences from WordPress right away. First, all options remain at the top of your window – you don’t have to scroll up to hit “Undo” or add a link. And since you can write offline, you can set up posts without an internet connection to avoid distractions.

Before you start, you’ll need to let Live Writer know about your blog. Choose the last tab on the upper right, Blog Account, click on Blog options, and you’ll be asked for your user name and password. Live Writer will take a few minutes to download information from your site. Unlike in WordPress, you’re able to see what the styles in your published post will look like while you are still typing. Live Writer lets you add as many blog accounts as you want, and if you start your post in the wrong style you can switch blogs with just a click.

Images and Plugins

My favorite feature of the moment is the way that Live Writer handles images. When I used WordPress, I needed to download photos from Flickr and upload them to my site’s media library. Live Writer lets me copy an image from Flickr, email or the internet and paste it right into the window. (Don’t forget to give proper credit.) When I publish the post, even as a draft, WordPress automatically uploads the image correctly.

Once you’ve pasted in your image, clicking it will access a Picture Tool. You can play with watermarks, size, border, alt text options and more. You can set up a default option for your images. There are also several plugins that simplify using images from Picasa or Flickr.

Did someone say plugins? Live Writer lets you download a wide range of plugins straight from the Live Writer window. I currently use two: Word Count and Insert Symbol. Live Writer isn’t perfect, and I missed those two WordPress features. Note to the author of Insert Symbol: Thanks for the fractions and dashes, but I’d love an e-egout and degree signs – I’m a food writer after all.

Because It’s the Little Things

Here are a few features that make Live Writer easy and fun:

• Just like in Word, Live Writer automatically makes two hyphens into a longer em-dash (only in Edit mode).

• When you highlight text and click on “Hyperlink,” Live Writer automatically inserts the URL you have just saved on your clipboard, saving the “pasting” step.

• Insert a Clear break, for when you want the rest of the text to appear under an image instead of wrapped around it. With WordPress, I need to type in code. (See example below)

• Remove all formatting from selected text—this has saved me many times.

• Move easily between Edit, Preview and Source (HTML) views at the lower left.

• Add categories, tags and date/time , including a time in the future, before posting.

• Choose between publishing as a draft or as a complete post. You can set Live Writer to open your site in your browser when you publish.

• Use the “Find” option to search for text. I’ve found that spell check can be a substitute for “Find and Replace.”

The biggest downside of the software has to do with special features or plugins in your theme or WordPress plugins that can’t yet be accessed from Live Writer.

Features Review

Let’s review the four tabs in Live Writer, starting from the upper left:

• File Manager (Appears as an icon of a page, with a down arrow.) Here’s where you start new posts, and manage drafts and published posts. Your ten most recent drafts will appear on the right, but if you click directly on “Recent Drafts” you can access all of them. ( Note : I inserted “Clear Break” from the insert tab at the end of this paragraph, to keep the next bullet point down where it belongs.)

• Home . This is where you’ll spend most of your time, with access to all formatting including hyperlinks, images, videos, lists, “remove format,” fonts, headers, spellcheck, find text, and publish.

• Insert . Here’s where you manage plugins, add hyperlinks, images and videos (yes, we just saw that) as well as photo albums, maps, tables and emoticons. The Horizontal Line, Clear Break and Split Post (More) appear here as well.

Blog Account . You only need this when you want Live Writer to update your theme, or add a blog account. You can also access your WordPress Dashboard or Comments page.

In each of the images, you’ll see three essential icons at the very top: Save, Undo and Redo. Click on the drop-down arrow for more options like New Post and Publish. I fell in love with Live Writer the day it crashed. I had just spent over an hour editing a long guest post. But Live Writer saved the day – when I restarted the program it asked me if I wanted to recover the post, and everything was there. Even when I accidentally clicked “No,” I was able to find a fairly recent version in Explorer by doing a search for Live Writer.

Have you ever used Live Writer? What is your favorite or least favorite feature? Share your experience in the comments.

Hannah Katsman helps home cooks save time and money at Cooking Manager.Com. She also writes about Jewish and Israeli parenting at A Mother in Israel. Check out her new Israeli Baby Names Forum.

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