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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