I get to review some software

I haven’t been asked or paid to do it, nor have I been coerced or suggestively steered toward doing this, for no other reason I gave this program a shot and so far I like it. So much so that I feel that I should be willing to say so.

Something made me come back to this and give it another try today, I had a quick look at it a while ago, but this particular program requires two parts. The application which for the most part is simple, and the other part, a web server end, a blog or a place for which it can publish to. Last time I didn’t really have a blog, now I do and now I find this new version is quite nice to use and surprisingly powerful. It found my blog, the type of blog and all the details from it quite quickly. Then I found the extra add-ins they have now and thought, “I should try them out and what better way but to use it, create with it and just go forth and blog about it”.

Yes, It’s Live Writer. A tool developed by Microsoft for writing and posting to blogs.

On the surface it’s little more than wordpad, a fancy text editor to write up a page or two of unindexed content and then save it out, not to file but to a web or blog server, easy. But things are never that easy, the world always makes them more complicated. Firstly, It has to work with various types of blog systems and cater for each when it does the additional tasks of embedding images, tables, videos, tags and such. So I pointed it toward my setup my account details and pointed it toward my recently setup wordpress blog. It found it, logged in and retrieved my groups and settings wonderfully, it also got my theme and presented the editor all pre-formatted with some of the represented, final style the pages will be posted in. It also gave me a few specific wordpress links to my site, dashboard, site admin and the discussion areas which is very helpful.

Then I looked at the plug-ins. They had a link to download more and it sent over to a ‘windows live’. I only found about 27 so far, but these included most of the the regular digg, flickr and insert code things that you might need today, more could be done soon I am sure, insert google adsense here perhaps, all these things are sure to come to those who wait.

For previous articles and blog posting I have use technoriety or now it’s called ScribeFire which is a plug-in for firefox that does much the same stuff, connects to the blog and allow you to write, draft and post your entries and it works well, but as a different application, Live Writer is already looking better.

Well it does all the normal text editing, spell checking and formatting things which is a given, but the extras and generally the nice way it happens is, for a change, nice. It works and the extras are wonderful.

So this article is an opportunity to get my opinion out there and a chance to try some of these extras as part of the publishing process. For free software, you can’t go wrong, get it, try it and tell me what you think.

Extra…
While writing this article I found anew theme for my blog, i love the style and have just applied it. With all the extras it includes I have some work to do to make it all work together, ads and link lists etc but it’s very stylish…