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Microsoft has released an interesting blog writing tool: Windows Live Writer.

It is a WYSIWYG desktop application that allows you to write a post locally then upload it to your blog. My blog uses the Wordpress engine. Why bother using Windows Live Writer when Wordpress already has a WYSIWYG editor? Well, I stopped using that editor some time ago because I found it unsatisfactory.

Live Writer connects directly with your blog admin, which is convenient.

Images: Even though Wordpress’s image uploading facility is now better than its earlier versions, I still find the process of adding images to be quite painful. Using Live Writer, adding images is very easy - just like adding an image to MS Word. But better than Word, it actually changes the file size - it doesn’t just change the viewing frame while leaving the size unchanged. The drop shadow is a freebie.

Adding a map is also easy, using Windows Live Map:

The interface for Live Writer is standard Windows:

(This image was achieved by copying from my image editor and pasting here. I don’t like the fuzzy appearance at all. What is it with MS and their fuzzy fonts and images which they think we like?)

This is the image as per my image editor:

The code that Live Writer produces is not too bad. I was worried it would be full of Micro$oft bloat. The CSS is not so good. For the images, it gives:

style=”border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px” height=”180″ alt=”PIE” src=”$104_0427.jpg” width=”240″ border=”0″

There is a lot of bloat here. It should be:

style=”border: 0;” height=”180″ alt=”PIE” src=”$104_0427.jpg” width=”240″

So will I continue to use Windows Live Writer? Maybe - it does seem to make life easy. I’ll try it a few times and see how it goes.