Windows Live Writer

Posted on August 15, 2006

I’ve been playing around a little with Microsoft’s new Windows Live Writer tool, and it’s pretty slick.

If you missed the announcement, WLW is a little graphical tool for composing posts to a blog. It works out of the box with MS’s Windows Live Spaces service, which isn’t surprising; and with any other blog tool that supports the MetaWeblog API (like Movable Type and WordPress), which is.

It writes nice clean XHTML, and (this is a nice touch) it even imports your stylesheet from your blog so that what you type in the editing window appears exactly the way it will on your blog:

It’s still a little rough around the edges in some places, but it’s still in beta so hopefully those will all be smoothed out by the final release. And even in beta it’s more impressive than any other posting tool I’ve seen for the Win32 platform — and that includes the ones that expect you to pay for them (WLW is free).

It’s nice enough that I find myself pining for something even close to equivalent for Linux — I’m on Windows at work but I’ve gone over to Kubuntu full time at home, and to the best of my knowledge there’s no Free tool that’s even remotely equivalent.

My kudos to the team at MS that whipped this up…