Not-at-all-coincidentally following on from my w.bloggar lament, I’ve been testing Windows Live Writer (which I mentioned last week, but never got around to installing).
Some observations:
- Lovely user interface. I can’t really fault it.
- The ability to just point it at a blog URL and have it work out what type of blog it is dealing with is very nice.
- It fulfils my major criteria for a blogging client, allowing me to edit the HTML of my post if necessary – although it doesn’t perform syntax highlighting, or have any obvious way of setting up custom tags. Also, it forces the use of paragraph tags / style even if I don’t want them.
- It doesn’t know about Roller, so for my internal IBM weblog I had to set it up with the Metaweblog API. It doesn’t seem to retrieve the tags / categories for a Roller weblog. It also isn’t able to download my blog’s style settings.
- It would be nice to have it provide support for uploading pictures to Flickr.
- There’s support for sending trackbacks automatically. I haven’t tried this yet, but it is a welcome addition.
All-in-all, remarkably nice for a beta.
Andy Piper
