Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

Wordpress is a great blogging platform offering plenty of templates and extensions. One thing that Wordpress needs to improve is their text editor which is often slow and buggy. For example – The built in spell checker displays spelling alternatives but does not commit changes. It also does not have a personal dictionary that can be built over time. Formatting text is often buggy when switching between preview & HTML modes. Previewing a draft  is slow in many cases. Another challenge is embedding images and controlling their position, size and margins like you see at the top-right corner of this blog. In order to get to the exact result you probably need to be an expect in HTML.

The buggy & slow Wordpress web interface led me over time to develop a clunky process – I used to write my drafts using MS Word (including spell check and proof read). I would then copy and paste the text into Notepad (so the rich-formatting from Word will not be preserved – otherwise I will have to switch to HTML mode inside Wordpress and clean all formatting). From Notepad I would then paste the non-formatted text into Wordpress. Then I would add links and photos/videos, preview the draft, switch again to edit mode and fix whatever formatting needs to get fixed, preview again and finally post.

A few days ago I installed Window Live Writer and it instantly became my primary blogging device. I must say that I am impressed with this simple productivity tool. It took me two minutes to setup the tool and connect it to my blog, including downloading the blog’s template and categories (once thing it does not allow is to create new categories), so now I can preview posts easily, instantly and even when offline. Live Writer offers a WYSIWYG editor that supports many of MS Word features and more: paste in rich media content using drag and drop, spell checker with ‘add to dictionary’, insert tables and embedded maps, add tags of different services and more.

Overall, the time I spend now on writing, editing, previewing, proof reading and posting to my blog has been significantly reduced.

What a great tool from Microsoft. Highly recommended to any blogger. This is a real time saver.