Trying Windows Live Writer

Thought I would give Windows Live Writer a go.

First impressions – it’s BlogJet with bits missing. Some of the screen are even in the same order, it’s a bit too close a likeness sometimes. The similarity to BlogJet is be interesting in itself though – I like to use BlogJet. BlogJet costs a small amount of money, so a free alternative is interesting.

I’ve already found a few places where BlogJet is definitely better. I add Flickr pictures into my posts which is best done using some code cut from Flickr. Switching to the code page is easier in BlogJet because it’s just a tab at the bottom of the screen, it’s a bit more complicated in WLW. You can use F12, but as I’m not likely to live most of my life in the tool I suspect I won’t remember that.

When working with code BlogJet highlights incomplete code, no such joy in WLW.

I was living in hope that Windows Live Writer would have the Microsoft Office wiggly line for spelling mistakes, but unfortunately not. You need to do the spell check. As others have mentioned Spell Check is Shift+F7, I have no idea why, F7 doesn’t do anything? Once is Spell Check there is no “Ignore All” option either. The Office Grammar checker would be even nicer, but I suspect I’m pushing for too much there.

BlogJet doesn’t do a good job of dealing with Tags, but at least I can create an “Auto Replace” which replaces a keyword with a set of code. Using this code it’s then really easy to create tags. There is no such option in WLW.

WLW allows you to add ping servers, but doesn’t have any in the default.

Given all of the effort Microsoft has put into smilies in other products I’m also a bit surprised that they haven’t put smilies into WLW. BlogJet smilies are great.

For some reason it can’t delete a post it creates in order to understand the make-up of the blog – that’s what this post is about. I thought I would leave it there as a reminder. This is a niggle really, I was just pleasantly surprised that WLW even considered blogging tools other than Spaces.

One thing I have notices, and it’s only a small thing, WLW does a proper selection when you double-click, BlogJet always selected the space following the word.

It’s still a Beta so hopefully we’ll see some changes.