Bit-Shift.Net

I've been blogging now for just over a year. Up until now I have been using the web interface for DasBlog to write my posts. To an extent, the web interface gave me all the functionality I needed for composing and posting articles to my blog. Now before I get into the reason I dislike using the web interface for posting blog articles I should mention what I use to write them most of the time.

For work I was given an IBM ThinkPad T43. I use this machine a lot since my personal laptop is getting up there in years and can't wander far from an outlet for more than 20 minutes before it dies. It has a pretty nice screen and a keyboard light for when I'm blogging in the dark, which has come in handy more times than I can count. Another thing it has is forward and back keys on either side of the up arrow key, so you can navigate through web pages quickly. Therein lies the problem. I used the keyboard and particularly the arrows keys quite a bit while composing posts and on numerous occasions while making final edits, I will accidentally hit the back key and lose something I've spent several hours writing.

For that reason and because I wanted to try something new, I installed Windows Live Writer (Beta). The first thing I noticed is the interface is really simple to use. Along the top are large buttons for the major writing actions (New, Open, Save and Publish). Just below that are the font and layout manipulating controls.  On the left side of the screen are some shortcuts for viewing drafts of posts in progress and recent posts, published from either Live Writer or published via the web interface that Live Writer can download and edit. Also on that menu are shortcuts to insert links, pictures, tags and even maps. Below is a picture of the building I work in. Pretty cool, huh :)

Where the work happens.

Another cool feature of Live Writer, for the more ambitious blogger's out there is support for posting to multiple blogs. In the top right corner there is a drop down for selecting which blog the current post in progress will be published to. Pretty handy for those people that have a personal blog as well as a blog they may get paid to write for. Just below the blog list is a drop down list containing all the categories I setup for my blog. Next to each category in the list is a checkbox, making it simple to assign a post to multiple categories.

So far I'm really liking Windows Live Writer. It has nearly everything I liked about the web interface of DasBlog and I no longer need to worry about accidentally navigating away from a post in progress. The one feature I'm missing is the ability to control picture placement via CSS, but maybe I'm just missing something or maybe they'll add it when this product goes gold. To any blogger out there I recommend giving Live Writer a shot. I think you'll be surprised at what you've been missing.

You can download it here.