G'day! Thanks for returning!
Like my bearded friend Dan York, I too am becoming more and more enamoured with Microsoft’s LiveWriter as an offline blog editing tool.
I like the fact that you can add plugins to it, ‘pick and choose’ style, with which to customise it. More and more plugins seem to be appearing each month.
I like that its layout is clean and neat and functional.
But here’s what still annoys me:
- The program ‘optimises’ any graphics it sends up to your site – despite the fact that I have already taken great care to optimise them in Fireworks. The result is blotchy, ugly graphics in each post that were lovely and clean when I inserted them.
- It doesn’t automatically remember and copy across from the clipboard any urls. Therefore, if I go to Dan’s site and copy (Ctrl+C) the link to his post about LiveWriter, when I come back to LiveWriter and attempt to create a link, it won’t ‘remember’ that url and automatically insert it. I have to Ctrl+V it into place. My beloved Zoundry does remember and auto-fill, which is a huge plus.
- It doesn’t create any css around tags, meaning that any technorati tags I insert into a post are not able to be differentiated by typeface, font size, font colour, etc., when it finally appears on my site.
- It doesn’t seem to hook into any dictionaries that may be running across other Microsoft products. For example, I use the Macquarie Dictionary’s spell checker in Office: aussie spellings and aussie words. Yet the LiveWriter dictionary is ‘one size fits all’ and I have to retrain it to accept aussie spellings.
- I don’t like that to configure it I have to add the main ping sites myself; these should have been added into the coding.
- If I’m manually adding some css (to achieve my dropcap, for example), LiveWriter doesn’t automatically ‘complete’ the code. Thus, if I type in <span class=”dropcap”> and then a character, then </ it won’t automatically complete it by auto-completing with span> , which Zoundry intelligently does.
Perhaps once it comes out of Beta these annoying little niggles will have been fixed. Because apart from them LiveWriter is a crackingly good blog editor! Go download it and try for yourself…
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Some very good points especially about ping and code-completion.
>> The program ‘optimises’ any graphics it sends up to your site – despite the fact that I have already taken great care to optimise them in Fireworks.
Do you even face this problem when you upload original images without resizing them inside WLW ?
Thanks for the feedback!
1. That’s a bug. We have a number of issues in this area that we are fixing. What kind of images are you talking about (format and color depth)?
2. You could also just Ctrl+V directly into the editor. Or use the “Blog This” button in your browser (it’s included for IE, a button is available for Firefox from Windows Live Gallery) which will also blockquote your selection (if you have one).
3. You can do this yourself–the Insert Tags feature lets you fully customize the HTML that’s generated for tags by using the Customize Provider option.
4. Sorry, we haven’t gotten around to this yet. We don’t offer non-US dictionaries at all at this point.
6. We really don’t do much for you in the source editor at all–it’s not been an area of focus for us up to this point. I’d want syntax highlighting first!
Joe – thanks again for joining the discussion!
1. In firefox I usually optimise as a jpg to around 86% of the original png (as for colour depth, etc., I don’t have a clue, sorry!)
2. I agree, but it it’s one more keystroke sequence (lazy or WHAT!?! {grin})
3. Didn’t realise that – will investigate the ‘customise’ feature when I get back to the office (I’m blogging away from my office at the moment)
4. No problems, but is there not a way of searching for the registered default Office dictionary if Office is intalled on the pc?
6. Syntax highlighting is a very nice nice-to-have, I agree! But as a quasi-geek I’d still prefer to have auto-closure of tags over highlighting…
Again, REALLY appreciate you joining in, Joe. If there’s anything I can do to help out (alpha/beta test upcoming versions, etc) I’m very happy to get involved!
Cheers,
Lee
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