Using Windows Live Writer with WordPress

Windows Live Writer is a new, free software program provided by Microsoft. The caption on the download site says: “Writer makes it easy to share your photos and videos on almost any blog service—Windows Live, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and many more”.

“Splendid,” I thought. I’ve wanted to try Writer out, and I needed to write a new blog post as I haven’t been as faithful to my blog the past month as I’d have liked to have been. Also, as much as I like the web-based revolution, I don’t particularly find WordPress.com’s online article editor very good for much else other than writing plain-text. Inserting and uploading media is a bit of a chore, but as I found out, Writer makes that rather easy.

Without further ado, I’ll run you through the setup process here, and comment on my experiences as I go. For added authenticity, I’ll actually be writing this blog post using Live Writer. So, fingers crossed – the proof (should be) in the pudding.

Installation

Installation is straightforward, simple and easy. The Windows Live downloader includes the option to include other products within the Live suite too, including Windows Live Messenger and Movie Maker Beta.

Setup

When you run the program for the firs time, you’re asked which blogging service you use:

You then need to fill out a few other details:

And, that really is about all you need to do. Once you’ve done this, Live Writer connects to your blog, configures itself (correctly) and even downloads your blog’s CSS styles and gives you a live preview as you type.  So far, so good.

The Editor

As soon as you startup after configuring your blog account, you’ll see the new editor window. It’s blank, waiting for you to write your next masterpiece:

Of particular interest here are the “Insert” links on the right-hand side of the screen:

I’ve always found the WordPress.com web editor a bit, well, clumsy. It’s clear (for sure), it’s just fiddly if you want to do anything that write text. Uploading pictures is a bit of a pain. Using Writer, I’ve simply been taking screenshots and pasting directly in to the editor window.

Rich Media Integration

Writer boasts the ability to publish your videos directly to the MSN Soapbox service, or to YouTube and then embed those videos directly into your blog. This is a really nice feature, and to test if it works, I’m going to insert a sample video here:

 

EDIT: As you can see, WordPress.com doesn’t seem to like the player code generated via Windows Live Writer. I’ll write to them, and ask why – and if I get a response, I’ll post it here. Shame!

Clicking on the “Video” link under “Insert” menu:

I chose “Soapbox” (as this is a service I have never used). Thankfully, there’s no registration forms to fill out. I just enter my Windows Live ID and create a ‘nickname’ for my Soapbox account:

… And that’s it. You’re then returned to the Live Writer editor and you can see your video uploading right in-place on your blog. Quite handy actually, because it meant I could carry on writing my article while the upload took place in the background.

After about 15 minutes, my video had uploaded and Soapbox had finished processing my video. The “uploading video” screen above is now replaced with:

Absolutely fantastic, so far then. So, let’s recap:

• I’ve uploaded a video to a service I’ve never used
• I didn’t have to prepare my video, I just found one and selected it
• I could carry on writing my article while uploading in the background, with the video placeholder in-line
• The video was uploaded and transcoded in around 15 minutes.

Very impressive. All I need now is some hyperlinks.

Hyperlinking

Ok, I’ve been building web pages since I was about 12. Hyperlinks are easy, right? Of course they are. But tell that to the WordPress.com editor. Linking to my previous posts has always been a pain because it doesn’t let me browse through them and pick them when creating a new link. I have to get my previous article URL and then cut and paste (somebody, please correct me if I’m wrong here – I really hope I’ve just missed this feature). Live Writer, though, does a great job:

Choosing “Previous post” then pops up the following:

Another awesome little helper-feature. Job done. Hyperlinks inserted. And I’m still in my nice WYSIWYG editor.

Summary

So, to finish up then, how would I summarise my experience using Windows Live Writer?

In a word, “brilliant”. In four words: “you should use it”.

It’s free, it’s very well built (as you’d expect), and it has a very polished interface. Microsoft have done a fantastic job here.