Eran Kampf
Eran Kampf
2 min read

Windows LiveWriter

I just downloaded and installed the new Windows Live Writer.

One important thing to note about Windows Live Writer (and Zoundry as well) is the support for RSD – Really Simple Discovery. This feature is supported in dasBlog’s latest source code but since I’m running the last official build I had to configure the settings myself.
Live Writer supports dasBlog so all I had to do in the configuration wizard was to specify that my blog is using dasBlog and the host url and that’s it.

So, to review the the program’s features:

The good:

  1. Windows Live Writer downloads the styles from my blog and when writing a post it allows writing it in a web view that looks like my blog (View->Web Layout) and it also allows previwing the post as part of my blog site
    (View->Web Preview).
  2. Supports proxies. So far I have been using Zoundry to write posts and since it does not support proxies I could not blog from work. Supporting proxies is important.
  3. You can configure a list of ping servers to ping when posting.
  4. It has an SDK.
  5. The ability to insert maps from Windows Live Local (though I wonder, what is it good for?).

The bad:

  1. No syntax highlighting andor auto-formating in the Html view.
  2. No social linking support. I want something like the feature in Zoundry that allows you to add links to tags in Technorati, Flickr, etc.
  3. Uploading images does not work (atlist with dasBlog…)

The ugly:

  1. In the “Insert Picture” dialog only GIF and JPG apear in the file types dropdown. What about PNG etc.?
  2. The About dialog. but I guess it’ll be improved :-)

Overall I’d say its a nice start. The program is nice and easy to use and I only wish uploading pictures would work…

Here are some screens (added manually):