Pages

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Windows Live Writer

Alright, I've downloaded and installed Windows Live Writer. It seems a nice application. The first con I'm noticing is that I can't find a way to edit previous posts.

The other functionality is very attractive. Web preview and blog styles allow you to see how the post will look like when posted to the blog. Blog's visual style is downloaded to your computer so blog posts can be previewed while being written.

It allows to add/set categories and publishing time. I wonder what time this post will get. Usually, when posting from ScribeFire, the post times are received from the server and those are from some U.S. time zone. This often means that I'm having troubles finding earlier posts because, for example, this morning posts (Australian time) are posted with yesterday night's date and time.
Writer has a handy option to set the post time to current time at the computer used for posting. But, this still gets translated into server time. Well, at least its consistent. :)

There appear to be many plugins. Some come installed with the application. These are basic ones, like Insert Picture, Insert Table, etc. Very practical. There are many more at the plugins site.

Anyway, I installed this application for offline editing and posting. Editing, so far, seems hard if not impossible. I have to go through the options once again.
And, to test the offline functionality, I will publish this post and see how the offline functionality works for the posts published through Writer itself.

***

Post published through Writer show up in the list of Recently Posted items. Still, this is only a list with titles. When selected, the post will be retrieved from the web, not from an offline cache.
There are also drafts, so that posts do not have to be published immediately but saved for publishing later.

And, yes, editing older posts works well. Now, I'd like to see how I can edit all the posts in the blog. Also, working with comments would be nice but that might be something more appropriate for a blog reader.

Well, after going through the options, I'm very pleased with the capabilities of the software. Older posts are available through standard File->Open operation. The posts are retrieved from the blog and the number of last post titles to retrieve can be set up to 500. Opening "Recent Posts" allows retrieving any item (All). This means if Writer is used for posting, all the posts should be retrievable for editing. Too bad an individual post can not be open by providing a URL or in some other way.
Nonetheless, the ability to edit older posts works well for simulating web pages because edits replace number of new posts. I actually prefer this option.

Well, so far, I very much prefer Writer to other posting solutions. The drawback might be only if I'm posting while away from my computer. But that should not be a problem. Still need to see where the settings are kept and if they can be synchronized. Not that it is important, though.

No comments: