Having just installed the new Windows Live Writer blogging applicationI thought I’d postsome initial thoughts.

Installation was straight forward, my wordpress blog was picked up after I entered just the base url, my username and password but it was unable to get my custom css so I was informed that editing would not use my styles. Not to worry for now, I’m sure this can be rectified at a later stage.

My categories were picked up fine after a refresh but I got an error relating to the “metaWeblog.getRecentPosts” method when trying to pull recent articles back from the blog.

I also downloaded two of the three available plugins, Fickr4Writer and Tag4Writer. The Flickr plugin didn’t seem to want to recognise my username so no go there, but the tag plugin seemed to work just fine adding a list of tags linked to tecnorati at the end of the post(why
this functionality isn’t just built straight into the editor I don’t know).

You can add maps from Virtual earththrough a VERY simplistic and clunky interface. I was able to find my home town and insert it though (see below). On a side-note, I’m more of a Google Maps/Earth kinda guy myself so Virtual Earth seemed a little under-whelming.

Unfortunately, while Live Writer was able to write several “Test Draft Posts” to my blog in an attempt to discover the CSS information (not cleaning up after itself which was very annoying) it was unable topublish eitherthe draft or the finished post to the server, which kind of renders it useless. Obviously, this being a beta, and an early one at that this is not really a huge surprise and I’m sure the wrinkles will get ironed out fairly quickly. In the end howeverI had to post this from Ecto,
which I’ve beentrailingrecently.

Problems aside I can see there being a market fora tool like thiswith non-technical bloggers (your mum & dad or grand parents) but for now at least there are a lot of more sophisticated tools available for the hardcore bloggers out there. Personally I’m just as happy using the browser based posting functionality of the blog itself and can’t wait until WordPress implement the new Shuttle admin interface.

Tags: Windows+Live!+Writer