windows live writer

I haven’t tried it yet, but will be doing so hopefully in the next day or so, if not this weekend.

i ll hold my breath then.

thanks again nitallica

Hi! Sorry I didn’t get back on here ’til now.

My test machine had a lot of problems running Live Writer, but my personal box ran it fine. (test: 1.4XP AMD, 512Mb ram, personal: 1.6XP AMD, 1Gb ram) *shrug* Go figure.

However, in my search for support info and reviews, I ran across a blog talking about a plugin for Firefox which basically did the same thing, except it’s for Firefox. ?? It’s called Performancing for Firefox (PFF).

Personally, I favor PFF over Live Writer. However, if Microsoft gets their collective snark together, I may give it another go someday.

I installed it (together with IE7) and blogged about a web page I was reading and it worked great.

It handled highlighting, blockquotes and source references, spell check really well.

Only one test though.

I’ve used it several days now. It’s nice, but as Nicki posts above, Performancing is much better for the Firefox user. I didn’t have any problems at all with WLW (other than the fact that posts with maps or graphics won’t validate unless you tweak the code through the html window first); but I’ll just keep it to use when I’m forced to use IE.

The things that REALLY annoyed me were:

1. In order to provide feedback, I had to get a hotmail addy or do MS’s stupid passport insecure crap. So I now have a totally useless hotmail addy.

2. In order to provide feedback, I HAD to do so using IE. Stupid.

The cool thing about Windows Live Writer is that it downloads the CSS for your blog and lets you edit your post in a WYSIWYG that perfectly mimics the environment that your blog frontend lives in.

I’ve been using Performancing’s Firefox thingy for quite some time. In general, I’ve been a big fan.

However, if I was going to get my mom blogging, I’d give her this Windows Live Writer thing if only because it is probably the easiest way I’ve seen yet to work with images. Mom won’t even have to worry about how they get to the blog. It just happens…

The last post to my blog I used Performancing and just about died when I saw it was written with non-xhtml tags (<i><b>) and tag-balancing seemed to fall apart while editing/moving things. This experience was limited to one post, so take it with a grain of salt…

HandySolo said he’d kick my a$$ if I didn’t try Live Writer so I’m using that currently for an article (not published yet) and a quick html-view shows some nice, clean xhtml code ;’)

Yes, to several above posts:

Performancing needs some help in the “tag soup” department, as I fedback to its devs. I don’t know if they are paying any attention – I haven’t received a reply;

The “visual” is great for those who need that sort of thing. I never use it, but as Handy said, for a new blog user, it would probably be in the neighborhood of “perfect”;

The code is clean until you add a map or graphic. Then you have to clean it up through the html screen. I did feedback about that too, but people just post to the dev blog, they never get answers (not unusual, this is MS after all – the only place in all its years MS has EVER replied publicly is the IE7 blog….)

/me is a stubborn git who wants to do everything within Firefox

lol

Re: PFF devs – they have been good so far about taking notice of feedback/advice, even if they don’t always reply. If anything, I’ll watch for the next release of their extension in the Mozilla Addons queue and test it (and give feedback from that).

Well, Live Writer appeared to do good code. Then I woke up.

Actually it was still better then Performancing, but it doesn’t do <img> well, and dropped off some </li>‘s inappropriately.

It also changed the date on my post to 12/31/1969 ;’) Ahh, Free Love….

It did look great though.

HandySolo tells me now (with his impeccable timing): “Oh, I don’t publish with Live Writer, I just post-as-draft and clean it up before publishing…” aaiiiieeeeeeee

well… I gotta add them UTW tags, doncha know…

Handy, don’t you use the in-built tech tags input with PFF?

Vkaryl,
Ya know? I don’t. I’m selfish, so I use the UTW tags as links to my site, not technorati.

And just to drift topic a bit…

Frankly, I’m reconsidering that notion though. Lately, I’ve noticed nobody actually clicks those tags anymore. And search works. So maybe this thread is the kick in the pants I need to flip my tags back to technowhozits tags. Which then gives me some more flexibility when using the blog clients.

Well, except for the above-noted caveats in re validation….