Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

8/13/2006


Windows Live Writer

Dwight Silverman raves about the public beta of Microsoft's new blog editor, Windows Live Writer.  Ed Bott does too.

Ed points out that the guy behind Live Writer is J. J. Allaire, founder of Allaire Corp., which developed web site editors ColdFusion and HomeSite.  Those were good programs, so that bodes well for Live Writer.

I'm writing this post with Live Writer and although the proof is in how it will look once I publish it- so far it looks really nifty.

I need to test an image insert, so here's another photo from our recent trip to the Frio River.

And I need to test the maps, so here's a map of Concan, Texas.  You can see the Frio River running north to south.

 

Two Features I Really, Really Want

Here are two features I want (paging J.J.)- a way to upload an image to allyoucanupload.com and insert it into a blog post with one click.  Now that would be righteous.  Also a plug-in for making Technorati tags is a must.

As many of you know, I host my own blog and related content, but use blogger to create and publish posts.  While I have long wanted to move to Wordpress, only to be stopped in my tracks by URL handling problems, Blogger is not a bad platform at all- at least when you use it the way I do.

One thing that I don't like about Blogger, however, is its 18th century looking spell checker.  A more robust spell checker alone might be enough to get me to adopt Live Writer (why do I think Day Tripper every time I type that?).

UPDATE: After I temporarily disabled Zone Alarm so the program could communicate with my server in order to upload photos, it works really well.  Give me the two features described above and I'm sold.

Posted by Kent @ 8/13/2006 08:03:00 PM | Permalink

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4 Comment(s):

allyoucanupload.com support could be added via a plug-in, if you could find a programmer who was so inclined :)

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8/13/2006 8:56 PM  
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Same with Technorati tags - or most other tagging engines. You can easily add them as plugins. The Writer team will talk more about plugins in the next few weeks, including where to find them quickly and easily when they do get built.

Just playing around internally at MS prior to this beta announcement, several tagging and photo service test plugins were done by people outside of the team (for fun, basically). They were very simple and very effective. The plugins are what gives Writer so much potential, IMO.

Kevin
http://seattleduck.com

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8/13/2006 10:21 PM  
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If you use Firefox, Performancing (www.performancing.com) makes a pretty decent blog editor. It does the Technorati tags for sure. I don't use images that often, but the image interface seems easy to me. Click on the image button, enter the URL. It evens gives an option to do FTP uploads in the interface. It's free and works right in Firefox and supports people that maintain multiple blogs and works with several types of blogs, including blogger.

By Anonymous Mike, at 8/13/2006 11:32 PM  
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The Windows Live Writer folks did a nice job. Also check out RocketPost, www.anconia.com/rocketpost. It's far more advanced than Writer, and there's a free version. (I designed it.)

By Blogger Manish, at 8/14/2006 12:20 AM  
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