Using Windows Live Writer (beta)

Using Windows Live Writer (beta)

Okay, so I’m trying out the Windows Live Writer — because I’m a sucker for new tools and I’m always on the lookout for the better (free) blogging tool. Besides, Amy at GentleWhisper made me do it. …

Installation

The install went okay … the second time. The installer wants to add the Windows Live toolbar to Internet Explorer. I initially opted for it, but after Live Writer failed to read my blog settings, I uninstalled everything and started over — this time without the toolbar.

On the second install I de-opted for the MSIE toolbar, since I rarely use MSIE anyhow. This time, Live Writer started up nicely and read my blog settings without halting. Not sure why the toolbar would’ve made a difference. Not sure if it did or not, but second time was the charm.

Setup

After installing,

you point LW to your blog address, and it will ask for your userid and password. It automatically figures out what tool you’re using and the necessary configuration is probably handled via XMLRPC. Pretty nice setup with few steps involved.

One interesting thing LW tries to do is download your default blog template and styles along with the images on the page for layout, etc. It does this, apparently, by creating a new post on the blog, then reading back the styles to see what your installation does with titles, body, and etc. As a result, you’ll find a new post on your blog like: “Temporary Post Used For Style Detection (6ce1b7e8-6792-4897-b938-1f089e053)”. (Incidentally, you can stalk who’s testing Windows Live Writer by searching the blogosphere for the phrase “Temporary Post Used for Style Detection.” <grin>)

Editing

Because LW goes through these gyrations, you get the benefit of several different ways to view your current blog post, just like with Word. You get the obligatory HTML View, like Word’s Draft View, which lets you edit raw HTML. Normal View shows you the barebones WYSIWYG view of your post without any real styling. The Web Layout view attempts to load your site’s default CSS so you can see your post with the proper styles applied. The Web Preview attempts to load your site’s default template as well as the stylesheet and will drop your post in-page so you can see what your fine writing will look like in the context of all your sidebars and image junk.

Unfortunately, LW didn’t read my site’s styles correctly. So, I found the folder where the files are stored, which is in an obscure location like this, on my system:

C:\Documents and Settings\
USER\Application Data\
Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates\
9c18eeb8-9423-49dc-8652-0db13f9ecf97\
7eabaaf2-faee-4bd7-9fa8-052de6c196c7\
core-styles.css

After manually downloading my stylesheets and overwriting the styles currently in the blog-templates folders the Web Layout view and Web Preview views were closer to what my blog looked like — especially the Web Layout view. But the Web Preview view (similar to Word’s Print Preview) still didn’t load the images that are supposed to be inlined in my template. So, really, I don’t expect I’ll be using the Web Layout view much. It just isn’t useful when the layout’s essentially broken.

As with Word’s Print Preview, the Web Layout view is not editable. But the other three views all are.

Inserting images was clumsy. There are some interesting features built in to transform the images you add with increased saturation, sepia-toning, black-and white, and so on. You can rotate the image, add a watermark overlay, add margins, and so on. Unfortunately, there are no GUI options for border=”0″ when hyperlinking an image and hspace and vspace options are missing — though you can add margins to the top, bottom, left, and right via inline styles.

You can add images from the web or from your hard drive and optionally upload them via FTP or XMLRPC, or you can opt to do all that manually and not upload images at all (you’d have to upload the images before you included them in your blog post, though, or only link to stuff elsewhere on the Web).

My image insert test proved a tad buggy, though. Live Writer did not recognize the actual pixel height and width of the image I imported. Instead, it multiplied the dimensions times ten. So, the 49×48 icon I imported originally came it at 490×480. When I corrected the width dimension to 49, it automatically changed the width dimension to 47 — which was an error I had to manually correct to 48.

After publishing the post, I checked to see where LW stored the image. It successfully placed my image in my /blog/pix/ folder, but it also created subfolders, which I don’t like, and assigned a new name to my file, which I really don’t like:

/blog/pix/e0f8443ef8e3_3850/logolivewriter17.gif

The image import interface here reminds me too much of the old FrontPage image handling. It tends to provide too many tools to automatically modify the images and image properties I’m trying to add, which I don’t like. The blogging tool shouldn’t pretend to be an image editor or CMS. This is maybe a nice feature for blogging newbies, but in my experience it introduces too many unintended consequences.

There’s an option to add a map to your blog post via Windows Live Map, such as this one below, showing pushpins for the main CTI offices and the rental space where my office is located:

Once you’ve inserted it, it’s not editable, so you’d have to delete it and reinsert a new map if it’s not to your liking. Also, if you haven’t enabled Live Writer to FTP or upload your images automatically, this simply won’t work for you. Even after I manually edited the link to the image to an http URL off my web server, Live Writer still failed to publish my post because it insisted on being able to re-upload an image that is already on my site.

Beyond those sticky problems, I’m not sure how useful this feature really is, but I’m sure it demonstrates how Live Writer will allow for Web 2.0 functionality to be implemented within the tool. We’ll see, as new features and plugins are released. (You can find some early plugins at JefTek.com.)

Someone elsewhere said “Cut and Paste” was broken, but it worked for me. One thing that’s missing, though, is the ability to paste without formatting. Often, when I copy text from a Web page, the styles get carried over into the WYSIWYG editor. The same is true here. So, if I don’t want the styles imported (color, font size, font style, etc.) I have to use an intermediate tool like Notepad to strip the text of its styling before then pasting into LW. Having a Paste as Text option would be nice.

The only styles LW imported into the style dropdown list are the standard “paragraph” and “Heading n” styles. It’d be nice if various styles from the CSS stylesheet would be imported into the style dropdown box, but that would probably generate untold user support issues. It would also be nice to have a built-in style editor, as well.

The spell checker worked fine, but there’s no option to edit your custom dictionary, so I’m not sure where the words are being stored when you add terms. So if you wind up adding an incorrectly spelled term, good luck finding the dictionary text file to edit (the registry provided no clues). There were no options to “Ignore All” nor was there an option to undo a correction.

Live Writer will save your posts to draft automatically every n minutes, but you have to set that manually — auto draft saving is not enabled by default. Which it should be, considering that this is beta software and could crash and burn taking your post down with it.

Publishing

Post properties are easily accessible and provide options to add trackback links, keywords, set commenting options, and the date/time. Unfortunately, adding keywords via the properties tab does nothing (as also happens with the other blogging tools I’ve used). It’d be nice to have other default WordPress options available here, as well, such as the post slug, but that may not be available via XMLRPC.

You can post your draft to your weblog, or go live directly from Live Writer.

Live Writer will automatically ping your favorite feed aggregators, but there are no default sites pre-installed, and you have to enable this option automatically. This is a global setting, and cannot be changed on a per-blog basis. (For instance, you might want to only ping FeedBurner on the weblog where you use FeedBurner, but you might want to ping Ping-O-Matic and Technorati (etc.) when posting to your non-Feedburner driven site. But no dice here. You’ll need to let your blog software do the pinging if that’s the case, or use a third-party pinger like Pong.) Because it’s a global option, you get to this through the Tools/Preferences/Ping servers setting.

Once you’ve published your post you can access it again through the File/Open post dialog, or by clicking on the “Open” icon. Interestingly the “Recent Posts” option in the resulting window doesn’t pull down my weblog’s most recent posts. It does nothing. Instead, I have to select my weblog’s account name in the list to access that blog’s archive. I’m guessing this is because LW is tuned to work with Live Spaces by default, and third-party blog software gets dropped into their own archive space.

Update: After publishing, the local copy of your post remains persistent — even if you’ve made changes via your blog interface. I typically like to shorten my slugs for posts so that the URLs are shorter than my titles. So, after pushing my article out to my blog, I went into WordPress to provide a shorter slug, and I also decided to change my post’s title. After saving my post, I had some other observations to add regarding where the images are saved, and so on, and I attempted to pull down my post from WordPress again to make the changes. My title did not get reset despite the fact that I re-edited the stored copy on WordPress. Apparently, LiveWriter doesn’t pull down the actual blog post, but it restored a copy from my hard drive for editing. This is bad. Very bad.

Further, there are two paces where I can pick a previously published post for re-editing. One is under “Recent Posts” and one is under my blog name, which presumably pulls the post off my blog. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference between the two options since both of them gave me a post with the incorrect title.

Conclusions

All in all, this is a nice, usable blogging tool for WordPress users, but I’m not sure yet that it’s much better than other tools currently available for free. Overall, the nicest feature is the ability to preview your posts using your site’s default styles. This is a great feature because too often writer’s simply cannot spot their errors and typos until they see their post in its final format. (How many times have I read and re-read a post in my editor only to read it once more on my blog and think, “Good golly, who’s the ham-handed writer that mangled my deathless prose?”

Unfortunately, this feature is marred by Live Writer’s flakiness in downloading and properly using the styles in place on my blog. I doubt most users would be motivated to find their stylesheets and overwrite Live Writer’s first attempt as I had to do.

I’ll keep trying it out. We’ll see if it sticks.

Update: As noted in the “Publishing” section above, Live Writer’s apparent tendency to serve up local copies of my blog entries for re-editing make this a failing contender for blogging. At least for now. That’s why this is still in beta. Hopefully improvements will come if the development team gets wind of reviews like this one.


[tags]beta, blogging, BlogRodent, Live-Writer, LiveWriter, Microsoft, review, software, tech, WordPress[/tags]

Installation

The install went okay … the second time. The installer wants to add the Windows Live toolbar to Internet Explorer. I initially opted for it, but after Live Writer failed to read my blog settings, I uninstalled everything and started over–this time without the toolbar.

On the second install I de-opted for the MSIE toolbar, since I rarely use MSIE anyhow. This time, Live Writer started up nicely and read my blog settings without halting. Not sure why the toolbar would’ve made a difference. Not sure if it did or not, but second time was the charm.

Setup

After installing,

you point LW to your blog address, and it will apsk for your userid and password. It automatically figures out what tool you’re using and the necessary configuration is probably handled via XMLRPC. Pretty nice setup with few steps involved.

One interesting thing LW tries to do is download your default blog template and styles along with the images on the page for layout, etc. It does this, apparently, by creating a new post on the blog, then reading back the styles to see what your installation does with titles, body, and etc. As a result, you’ll find a new post on your blog like: “Temporary Post Used For Style Detection (6ce1b7e8-6792-4897-b938-1f089e053)”. (Incidentally, you can stalk who’s testing Windows Live Writer by searching the blogosphere for the phrase “Temporary Post Used for Style Detection.” <grin>)

Editing

Because LW goes through these gyrations, you get the benefit of several different ways to view your current blog post, just like with Word. You get the obligatory HTML View, like Word’s Draft View, which lets you edit raw HTML. Normal View shows you the barebones WYSIWYG view of your post without any real styling. The Web Layout view attempts to load your site’s default CSS so you can see your post with the proper styles applied. The Web Preview attempts to load your site’s default template as well as the stylesheet and will drop your post in-page so you can see what your fine writing will look like in the context of all your sidebars and image junk.

Unfortunately, LW didn’t read my site’s styles correctly. So, I found the folder where the files are stored, which is in an obscure location like this, on my system:

C:\Documents and Settings\
USER\Application Data\
Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates\
9c18eeb8-9423-49dc-8652-0db13f9ecf97\
7eabaaf2-faee-4bd7-9fa8-052de6c196c7\
core-styles.css

After manually downloading my stylesheets and overwriting the styles currently in the blogtemplates folders the Web Layout view and Web Preview views were closer to what my blog looked like–especially the Web Layout view. But the Web Preview view (similar to Word’s Print Preview) still didn’t load the images that are supposed to be inlined in my template. So, really, I don’t expect I’ll be using the Web Layout view much. It just isn’t useful when the layout’s essentially broken.

As with Word’s Print Preview, the Web Layout view is not editable. But the other three views all are.

Inserting images was clumsy. There are some interesting features built in to transform the images you add with increased saturation, sepia-toning, black-and white, and so on. You can rotate the image, add a watermark overlay, add margins, and so on. Unfortunately, there are no GUI options for border=”0″ when hyperlinking an image and hspace and vspace options are missing–though you can add margins to the top, bottom, left, and right via inline styles.

You can add images from the web or from your hard drive and optionally upload them via FTP or XMLRPC, or you can opt to do all that manually and not upload images at all (you’d have to upload the images before you included them in your blog post, though, or only link to stuff elsewhere on the Web).

My image insert test proved a tad buggy, though. Live Writer did not recognize the actual pixel height and width of the image I imported. Instead, it multiplied the dimensions times ten. So, the 49×48 icon I imported originally came it at 490×480. When I corrected the width dimension to 49, it automatically changed the width dimension to 47–which was an error I had to manually correct to 48.

After publishing the post, I checked to see where LW stored the image. It successfully placed my image in my /blog/pix/ folder, but it also created subfolders, which I don’t like, and assigned a new name to my file, which I really don’t like:

/blog/pix/e0f8443ef8e3_3850/logolivewriter17.gif

The image import interface here reminds me too much of the old FrontPage image handling. It tends to provide too many tools to automatically modify the images and image properties I’m trying to add, which I don’t like. The blogging tool shouldn’t pretend to be an image editor or CMS. This is maybe a nice feature for blogging newbies, but in my experience it introduces too many unintended consequences.

There’s an option to add a map to your blog post via Windows Live Map, such as this one below, showing pushpins for the main CTI offices and the rental space where my office is located:

Once you’ve inserted it, it’s not editable, so you’d have to delete it and reinsert a new map if it’s not to your liking. Also, if you haven’t enabled Live Writer to FTP or upload your images automatically, this simply won’t work for you. Even after I manually edited the link to the image to an http URL off my web server, Live Writer still failed to publish my post becuase it insisted on being able to re-upload an image that is already on my site.

Beyond those sticky problems, I’m not sure how useful this feature really is, but I’m sure it demonstrates how Live Writer will allow for Web 2.0 functionality to be implemented within the tool. We’ll see, as new features and plugins are released. (You can find some early plugins at JefTek.com.)

Someone elsewhere said “Cut and Paste” was broken, but it worked for me. One thing that’s missing, though, is the ability to paste without formatting. Often, when I copy text from a Web page, the styles get carried over into the WYSIWYG editor. The same is true here. So, if I don’t want the styles imported (color, font size, font style, etc.) I have to use an intermediate tool like Notepad to strip the text of its styling before then pasting into LW. Having a Paste as Text option would be nice.

The only styles LW imported into the style dropdown list are the standard “paragraph” and “Heading n” styles. It’d be nice if various styles from the CSS stylesheet would be imported into the style dropdown box, but that would probably generate untold user support issues. It would also be nice to have a built-in style editor, as well.

The spell checker worked fine, but there’s no option to edit your custom dictionary, so I’m not sure where the words are being stored when you add terms. So if you wind up adding an incorrectly spelled term, good luck finding the dictionary text file to edit (the registry provided no clues). There were no options to “Ignore All” nor was there an option to undo a correction.

Live Writer will save your posts to draft automatically every n minutes, but you have to set that manually–auto draft saving is not enabled by default. Which it should be, considering that this is beta software and could crash and burn taking your post down with it.

Publishing

Post properties are easily accessible and provide options to add trackback links, keywords, set commenting options, and the date/time. Unfortunately, adding keywords via the properties tab does nothing (as also happens with the other blogging tools I’ve used). It’d be nice to have other default WordPress options available here, as well, such as the post slug, but that may not be available via XMLRPC.

You can post your draft to your weblog, or go live directly from Live Writer.

Live Writer will automatically ping your favorite feed aggregators, but there are no default sites pre-installed, and you have to enable this option automatically. This is a global setting, and cannot be changed on a per-blog basis. (For instance, you might want to only ping FeedBurner on the weblog where you use FeedBurner, but you might want to ping Ping-O-Matic and Technorati (etc.) when posting to your non-Feedburner driven site. But no dice here. You’ll need to let your blog software do the pinging if that’s the case, or use a third-party pinger like Pong.) Because it’s a global option, you get to this through the Tools/Preferences/Ping servers setting.

Once you’ve published your post you can access it again through the File/Open post dialog, or by clicking on the “Open” icon. Interestingly the “Recent Posts” option in the resulting window doesn’t pull down my weblog’s most recent posts. It does nothing. Instead, I have to select my weblog’s account name in the list to access that blog’s archive. I’m guessing this is because LW is tuned to work with Live Spaces by default, and third-party blog software gets dropped into their own archive space.

Update: After publishing, the local copy of your post remains persistent–even if you’ve made changes via your blog interface. I typically like to shorten my slugs for posts so that the URLs are shorter than my titles. So, after pushing my article out to my blog, I went into WordPress to provide a shorter slug, and I also decided to change my post’s title. After saving my post, I had some other observations to add regarding where the images are saved, and so on, and I attempted to pull down my post from WordPress again to make the changes. My title did not get reset despite the fact that I re-edited the stored copy on WordPress. Apparently, LiveWriter doesn’t pull down the actual blog post, but it restored a copy from my hard drive for editing. This is bad. Very bad.

Further, there are two paces where I can pick a previously published post for re-editing. One is under “Recent Posts” and one is under my blog name, which presumably pulls the post off my blog. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference between the two options since both of them gave me a post with the incorrect title.

Conclusions

All in all, this is a nice, usable blogging tool for WordPress users, but I’m not sure yet that it’s much better than other tools currently available for free. Overall, the nicest feature is the ability to preview your posts using your site’s default styles. This is a great feature because too often writer’s simply cannot spot their errors and typos until they see their post in it’s final format. (How many times have I read and re-read a post in my editor only to read it once more on my blog and think, “Good golly, who’s the ham-handed writer that mangled my deathless prose?”

Unfortunately, this feature is marred by Live Writer’s flakiness in downloading and properly using the styles in place on my blog. I doubt most users would be motivated to find their stylesheets and overwrite Live Writer’s first attempt as I had to do.

I’ll keep trying it out. We’ll see if it sticks.

Update: As noted in the “Publishing” section above, Live Writer’s apparent tendency to serve up local copies of my blog entries for re-editing make this a failing contender for blogging. At least for now. That’s why this is still in beta. Hopefully improvements will come if the development team gets wind of reviews like this one.


[tags]beta, blogging, BlogRodent, Live-Writer, LiveWriter, Microsoft, review, software, tech, WordPress[/tags]

6 thoughts on “Using Windows Live Writer (beta)

  1. Amy

    Hey, thanks for the review! I wasn’t willing to spend writing one as helpful as this… now I can just link to yours. :)

  2. Rich Post author

    Ha ha, thanks Amy, I can always use the link-love.

    You’re right, Tim. I don’t like apps that bundle other apps. Another unfavorite of mine is QuickTime, which forces an install of iTunes, which I don’t use, and don’t need, and don’t want. You have to really hunt the QT page to find the unbundled version of the player.

    At least Live Writer splashed a screen giving me the option to install the toolbar. I was an idiot for installing it, but I removed it safely enough.

    Rich.
    BlogRodent

  3. Joe Cheng [MSFT]

    Thanks for the review, somehow I did not see it until now. Lots of great feedback, we will certainly take it into account as we work on future versions.

    BTW, we no longer bundle the Windows Live Toolbar with Writer. We thought making it optional in the installer was enough to make it not totally sneaky but too many users were accidentally installing it without meaning to.

  4. Rich Post author

    Thanks for noticing and taking the time to comment, Joe! I’m happy to play a small role in highlighting features that could use improvement, though I’m sure I said nothing new.

    I find it ironic that you blog from a WordPress site while developing a Windows Spaces blogging tool … I’m sure there’s a story there, but I won’t press for details. :)

    Regards,

    Rich
    Rich

  5. Pingback: Windows Live Writer » GentleWhisper.com - By Amy Maxwell

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