WeBubble

My first foray into the world of blogging - Windows Live Writer

I plan on sharing my experiences predominantly from a development point of view on a few projects I’m currently working on. I develop some medium-ish e-commerce sites using everyone’s favourite PHP and MySQL combo. I hope to leave a few coding tips that I have picked up along the way and rant about any annoyances I come across as well. To get me started, I share the wonders and not so wonders of Windows Live Writer (Blogging Tool).

First off, my friend over at Office Days introduced me to Windows Live Writer. I was some what skeptical at first, especially with Microsoft’s recent history of trying to force themselves into the social networking scene, however it came highly recommended, so I thought I would give it a try. The first time I tried to install it, I was prompted with a “lovely” windows live installer, giving me the options to install all sorts of crap wonderful live products. However I was only interested in blogging from an application rather than having to use a web based admin panel, so I let the installation commence. It told me it was installing the Live Writer, so I went off to get a coffee and let it get on with doing its business. To my somewhat not surprise I came back to see that it had failed to install Live Writer, a nice big red X was placed next to the item, and a link to click for more help. The link was about as useful as most Microsoft Live help, telling me to make sure I’m connected to the Internet and that I don’t have Windows Firewall blocking the application.

Being the idiot that I am, I thought why not just try to install it again? So I did, this time, I got a wonderful message during install saying “Sorry this is taking longer than expected, please bear with us“. I have to give them an A+ for courtesy, but it just makes me wonder why can’t they just provide an installer that works? Like the message said it did take a long time to do anything with the bar going backwards and forwards and eventually coming to some sort of conclusion. My idiocy had paid off, it appears to have installed fine! Thus proving at first if you don’t succeed, just try again.

Closing the installation wizard (reminds me more of Rincewind) Windows Live Writer booted up, and I was presented with another “Getting Started Wizard”, so with intrepid fingers, I clicked on through the options of providing my existing blog information, URL, username, password, the usual bits. It once again tried to do something, however this time it was much faster, and to my amazement, it had found all of my blog information (WordPress) and was all setup ready to go! A wonderful white page was shown to me, with the standard Windows Live style bars and helpers around the edge. It feels very much like Word, with spell checking, the ability to save drafts, all of the standard blogging and html buttons and shortcuts are also available. So far after writing this post, it seems to work nicely with WordPress, and hopefully I will continue to use it as a worthy alternative to blogging via the WordPress back end.