Windows Live Writer and DasBlog 1.9
Microsoft just released Windows Live Writer, an offline blogging editor tool.
It's beta, so there's a few bugs.
- The first glaring one is that if you have a lot of categories on your blog, the categories dropdown goes forever and continues down past the toolbar.
- Another irritating one is that only GIF and JPG show up in the file types list when adding an image to a post - um, PNG?
- There's also no syntax highlighting or auto-formatting for the HTML view.
All in all, it looks a AWFUL lot like BlogJet, my preferred blog editor, down to the properties tab. The irony is, of course, that all these editors basically use the same DHTML Editing stuff built into IE or some flavor of it, so the actual editing experience will feel much the same.
Here's a list of other VERY good blog editors that I've used personally. I posted about a few last year as well, but John Forsythe has the complete list of ones that work well with DasBlog.
- Zoundry is also a great blog writer that supports DasBlog swimmingly.
- Rocketpost is nice, clean and lightweight and has some nice Photo effects.
- WB Editor has a fresh and clean interface, but a smallish text editing area at low resolutions.
One important thing to note about Windows Live Writer (and Zoundry as well) is the support for RSD - Really Simple Discovery. Omar added this to the current source tree of DasBlog recently. This will be in DasBlog 1.9, but, as always, you can compile the source yourself and get it now.
RSD worked great during the setup phase with Windows Live Writer as seen in the screenshots below. The writer detected DasBlog's capabilities and API support and configured itself without asking me a single technical question. Nice.
Windows Live Writer also has an SDK for extending the application.
Here's my final thought - why would a Product Group that offers a blogging editor and has their own blog, ask users to go to an MSN Group to offer feedback? Isn't that kind of not-bloggy? Remember earlier in your post where it was said blogging was a two-way medium?
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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Chris
I guess this is how they integrate styles into the web preview. Maybe by taking a diff?
Hi Scott,
We're taking feedback just about any way we can get it, whether thats blog posts like yours, comments on our blog, emails from people, _or_ feedback on MSN groups. (I haven't received any phone calls (yet) :) ). We don't expect all of our feedback on Groups- we just figured the more ways that people can tell us about their experience using Writer, the better!
-charles
There was a lot of debate internally just before we shipped this beta about whether we should ask before we make this temporary post. We ended up deciding not to ask before posting it for a couple of reasons:
- If we don't make this post, a major piece of functionality would be broken
- We would correctly delete the post right away, so it would only appear very briefly
- It would be difficult to explain what were doing in the configuration wizard, and we wanted to keep the configuration process as simple as possible.
Hopefully we got this one right- please let us know one way or another!
-charles
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