Windows Writer: Blogging Made Easier

Now that I’m back to blogging after my single day of “retirement,” I thought I’d blab about a nifty blogging tool I came across accidentally while going through my e-mail.

Windows Writer is part of the Windows Live suite of tools by Microsoft, a suite which the Redmond-based software giant wants you to believe will make your life easier. And while I haven’t given all of these tools a full test-run, I have been tinkering with Writer a little bit today and let me tell you, it’s pretty cool. In fact, I’m using it to write this post and will probably continue to use it because I like it so much.

Why? Well, say you want to create and post a spiffy album of pictures from your computer. It’s as simple—and visually appealing—as this:

View Full Album

(Note: When creating an album, they will be uploaded to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s online storage solution. Also, I’ve yet to figure out how to disable downloading the images, so in order to prevent people from downloading your the full-size images, consider making them lo-res.)

Or if you want to spice up your pictures with cool Polaroid-esque borders, you can do that with an available plug-in:

(Note: Images are directly uploaded to your blog host and the plug-in’s name of “Polaroid” is a bit of a misnomer as the images just appear to have white borders and look nothing like Polaroids.)

And if you have a Flickr account, a plug-in is available that allows you to grab your public pictures them and post them to your blog, like this:

Want to post a quick map image of where you had lunch today? It’s as simple as this:

YouTube video? Easy:

(Note: You can only link to YouTube videos from your library.)

How cool is all this?

When you sign up for this, you also get SkyDrive which serves up 25GB of free online storage, which can come in handy in case you’re near your (free) limit with WordPress.com’s 3GB.

Speaking of which, Writer is also compatible with a myriad of blog hosts including WordPress (web-based only as far as I know). Once it retrieves your WordPress account information, the Writer interface allows you to do just about everything you can from the standard WordPress Dashboard, save for some of their proprietary features such as templates and Soundcloud clips.

In short, Writer looks like a stripped-down version of Word and is fantastic for posting blog entries, which is exactly what it is designed to do. Editing of existing entries, template changes, etc. must still be done through your blog host. But for the functionality it offers, I’m willing to forego the shortcomings.

So instead of me singing its praises, download it and see for yourself how it works.

Oh, and despite me saying I’ll spend less time on Facebook, I went through the trouble to create my own Fan Page for this here blog. If you want to become one, here’s the link:

So show your allegiance and do it—NOW!

—
Share this post:

: : : : : : : : : : :