Windows Live Writer is a Godsend [Review]

Thursday, June 26th, 2008 @ 8:59 pm | Blog, Tech

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International website connections from Vietnam can be very slow. That means that say you want to browse YouTube from Hanoi, the connection is much slower than if you were to connect to Clip.vn or Cyworld Studio. It’s not just because of distance, it’s more of that Vietnam only has 1 undersea cable connecting to outside of Vietnam. There used to be two, but pirates stole the other cable due to a snafu in Vietnamese politics early in 2007.

That said, this WordPress blog is hosted on Bluehost, a US provider. Access is pretty damn slow for me from Hanoi. I’d be pissed off at Bluehost, but everyone in the US says my blog is fast for them, and Bluehost has a good reputation overall, so I’m sticking with them. Writing blogs online, even accessing blogs can be a real pain the ass, so when I started to look for desktop blog writing solutions last year, Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer has been starting to get mention as a good solution even though it was just in beta.

From Wikipedia:

“Windows Live Writer, developed by Microsoft, is a desktop blog-publishing application that is part of the Windows Live range of products. It features WYSIWYG authoring, photo-publishing and map-publishing functionality, and is currently compatible with Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Wordpress, Community_Server, PBlogs.gr, JournalHome, the MetaWeblog API, the Moveable Type API, and all blogs that support RSD (Really Simple Discoverability).”

I’ve heard other people say this as well, and mention it as possibly the best solution out there, and for me at least, I love it. Cannot go without it for posting.

Here’s what the interface looks like, you can close or open different sidebars (in the screenshot, I’ve opened the bottom and right sidebars):

(don’t worry, you can adjust UI colors if my orange is not your thing)

Everything you need to write posts- tags, categories, scheduling dates, inserting (and editing pictures), etc. You can preview your new post in your actual theme without needing online access too.

The only thing it can’t do (and I wouldn’t expect it to be able to) is support your Wordpress editor plugins.

Two issues so far that I’m not sure will ever be fixed, but still wouldn’t sway me from using WLW.

If I upload a heavy post, one that has a lot of images or a video, WLW is likely to, from my understanding, essentially time out. Will get an error and not upload. I think this is primarily due to the speed in Vietnam. It’s not always predictable when this will happen, however. Sometimes I get the error, but the post is uploaded anyway. It’s a bit annoying.
Not enough plugins. There are some good plugins, but the development (one new plugin might appear every month, one good plugin, much less often) is very slow. I’m surprised that usage of WLW is not that high, or that they’re aren’t more plugins since the software is so good.

Additional things I would ask for are more formatting options (I don’t think I can adjust font), and more blog management directly from the desktop UI (you can do some, but it’s so slow from my connection), but that’s about it. It’s a great piece of software, and it’s free. I’d pay for it though, definitely.

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