Microsoft has had me pulling my hair out over the past month or two with some truly boneheaded moves. But then they release something like Windows Live Writer and I remember that there is an upside for all the frustration.
I first saw a reference to Windows Live Writer on Liveside this morning and made a note to check it out later. Then I got a note from Dwight Silverman, who called it “the best blogging editor I’ve seen yet.”
First impressions? Wow.
But that should be no surprise. As soon as I saw who was behind this, I knew the bar was going to be set very high. The team is led by J. J. Allaire, founder of Allaire Corp., which developed ColdFusion and HomeSite (my very first website editor). A couple years ago, after selling Allaire Corp. to Macromedia, he founded Onfolio, which delivered the first version of what had the potential to be a great web-clipping application. It never got the chance to really see maturity, because Microsoft snapped up Onfolio and has been busily making use of its pieces.
I’ve used just about every blog editor around and had settled on BlogJet as the best of the bunch, although far from perfect. In less than 10 minutes, this one is well on the way to winning me over.
Update: LiveSide has an interview with J.J. Allaire.
Update 2: In the comments, Dwight points out that Allaire acquired HomeSite (and hired its founder, Nick Bradbury) from Bradbury Software. Nick went on to develop FeedDemon, my favorite newsreader, which was acquired by NewsGator, whose CEO J.B. Holston formerly ran Ziff-Davis Europe, where I worked on the German Windows Magazin in the mid-1990s. Small world. Thanks, Dwight.
Update 3: After a few days of using it, I still love Windows Live Writer. See this post at ZDNet.>
Ed Bott 
A clarification, Ed. Allaire didn’t create HomeSite; his company bought the software from Nick Bradbury, who wrote it. Nick also did FeedDemon, which was recently acquired by NewsGator.
Yeah, it’s a bear trying to keep up with who bought who…
Hey Ed, I work on the Writer team and I saw your comment on the Writer blog about nonbreaking spaces. Would you mind shooting me an email about what exactly you are setting(your comment form took my email address, so I assume you have it now…)? There were plenty of querks in the IE design-mode we had to overcome to remove editing frustration, and this sounds like one I’d like to beat on.
Spike, you’ve got mail!
Dwight, thanks. I updated the post. Btw, the Wikipedia article on HomeSite is worth reading. This quote reminds me why I loved HomeSite and why I’m not surprised to see both FeedDemon and Live Writer so polished and usable:
That’s how great software is developed.
Yeah, I love HomeSite. We used it to do the Chronicle’s site for years, until we went with a content manager that shields us from HTML. To this day, I’d still rather be using HomeSite.
Unfortunately, Macromedia let HS go fallow. God knows what will happen to it now that Adobe’s got it.
, where I worked on the German Windows Magazin in the mid-1990s. Small world.
it is 😎
Funny, Ed, I had you pegged as a NewsGator Inbox Publisher plugin guy…
Have you tried it?
I do like the Live Writer, though. Not sure if I’ll make it my main blogging tool, but I’ll try it for a while. I do like the “no kidding” preview…NewsGator Publisher does lack that…
The Windows Live Writer folks did a nice job. Also check out RocketPost, http://www.anconia.com/rocketpost. It’s far more advanced than Writer, and there’s a free version. (I designed it.)
Microsoft has killed Onfolio development? Say it isn’t so! Onfolio is hands-down the best feed reader for Windows.
Onfolio is available now as an add-in for the Windows Live Toolbar. IIRC, it also used to be available as a standalone program and a Firefox extension, but apparently no more. I haven’t used it in a long time, so I don’t know anything more than I read at onfolio.com.
It’s very nice but it can’t upload images to blogger.com
Ed:
I gave WLW a test drive with blogger this morning and, like George, found it wouldn’t upload graphics to the Blogger image server. However, its other features are good enough to have caused me to decide to write the text in WLW and upload images to the blog with Blogger and Firefox.
One gripe I have is that entities don’t work for me in the WYSIWYG editor.
The details are at http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/windows-live-writer-beta-blogger-test.html.
–rj
George and Roger, are there any external blog post editors that allow posting of images to Blogspot/Blogger? I know BlogJet doesn’t do it, and in this support post by Dmitry, the developer of BlogJet, he says Blogger doesn’t support this capability by API.
If that’s true it seems like a limitation of every third-party blogging tool, not just WLW.
Thomas, I tries the NG Inbox Publisher tool long ago, but didn’t really click with it. When I switched to FeedDemon, it fell off my radar completely.
I also use Blogger and have in the past used w.bloggar to post to my blog. To post pics, I use http://www.photobucket.com which is a freebie place to post small pics that one can then copy the url tags for to place into one’s blog. So to get it to post in Live Writer, I used Live Writer’s tool to select any ol’ photo off of my HD and then went into the HTML view and replaced what it had put in there with the URL tag info from my pic at http://www.photobucket.com . Worked like a charm, if a bit clumsy. LiveWriter should have a way of inserting image tags without having to do what I did. Slick looking tool though – will play some more with it.
Did notice that under View, I had to select “update weblog style” before it recognized the style template I had used in Blogger. That was not particularly intuitive.
Also would be nice if one could bring up up the template for one’s blog, so one could edit it – I do that frequently with w.bloggar, but don’t see a way to do that in LiveWriter , unless I missed it. (the w.bloggar web site at http://wbloggar.blogspot.com/ doesn’t seem to be working, for whatever reason – you can access it at http://wbloggar.blogspot.com/, if you’re interested.)
Mark
I read in your ZD column that you were hoping to be surprised by Microsoft with a Firefox extension. Commenting on that site asks me for “just a tad” too much personal information, so I thought I would let you know here that there IS a Blog This w. Windows Live Writer Firefox extension. [Cynthis, you pasted in some text instead of a URL, so I found the extension and fixed the hyperlink here. Let me know if you were rerferring to something else! – Ed]