Live Writer, the best offline blog editor!!

The last few weeks have been really busy and I have been travelling to places with limited Internet access. There were lots of pending blog posts sitting idle as drafts. I could not do much with the limited access I had. Then, I realized the need for offline blog editors. My immediate choice was offline blogger (blogger with Gears). But, Gears never worked great on my machine. I started my hunt by evaluating the blogging capabilities of Office 2007. I was just looking for two features – 1. A rich interface for editing the text contents, 2. A Picture Uploader. Office 2007 failed miserably when it comes to uploading photos in blogger. On further googling, I came to know about this neat tool ‘Windows Live Writer”. Earlier I have expressed my excitement over this on the twitter channel.Here are the features I liked the most:

Feature Highlights:

• Rich editor interface. If you are comfortable using Microsoft Office, the editor in Live Writer can be easily adopted. Its an extension to Microsoft Word except for the support for HTML elements here. The editor is very much user friendly and provides lots of formatting options. A separate HTML editor is also available for any custom edits.
• Picture editing. Picture editing is awesome when compared it to its competitors. With Live Writer, lots of effects like Drop shadow, Reflection, etc can be added to the pictures. These pictures will be uploaded to the blog provider’s photo upload site (Picasa for Blogger). If we have our own photo sharing site, it is possible to configure that as well. There are options to embed a set of pictures as an album. The picture editing options are just endless. Play around with it.
• Preview with Styling. This is another exciting feature. This allows you to preview the blog post as it looks on your blog including the styling. While the blog is configured to be used with Live Writer, it downloads the template being used and uses that for showing the preview.
  
• Local drafts. Live Writer provides the ability to save the posts drafts locally as well as on the blog’s server. It synchronizes the local copy with the server copy when the post is published.
  
• Plug-ins add value. Live Writer opens up the plug-ins to the public. Anyone interested can write an extension to automate certain post blog actions like publishing the post in Technorati, etc. There are lots of interesting plug-ins available. Twitter plug-in (posts an update to twitter on publishing the post) is the most famous of them all. Gallery here.

Thanks to Microsoft for this much useful tool and its available for free. Download it from here.

 

Other offline editors: ScribeFire, Post2Blog, w.bloggar, BlogDesk

-- Varun