Windows Live Writer

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Courtesy of the latest issue of WXPNews, I came across a very cool new blogging tool, named Windows Live Writer.

This is a desktop application that makes it very easy to write new blog posts by providing a WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editor that reminds me of a slimmed down version of Microsoft Word.

Windows Live Writer has some pretty cool features, like the ability to automatically spell check your blog posts before posting them and automatically saving a draft every x minutes.

While it is primarily focused on helping you write blog posts for Windows Live Spaces, it also supports many other popular blogging sites, including Blogger.com, Community Server, dasBlog, and many others.

I used it to compose this blog post, and it rocks. I highly recommend checking it out.

For those of you who want to use Windows Live Writer with your geekswithblogs blog, you will need to select the Custom (Metaweblog API) as the blog type (this is the blog provider) and enter:

http://www.geekswithblogs.net/[YOUR_BLOG_NAME]/services/metablogapi.aspx

for the remote posting URL. Complete details can be found here.

The only drawback that I’ve seen so far is that you can’t configure the advanced options associated with the post. You can configure the categories using the dropdown that appears in the toolbar. I’m not 100% certain if you can edit an existing post. The capability is there for other blog providers, but it isn’t working right now for my geekswithblogs blog.

There is a geekswithblogs Live Writer plugin being considered, but right now it is in the requirements gathering phase.

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