Take Advantage Of The New Windows Live Writer

If I could name one Microsoft application which has met with the near unanimous approval of the tech crowd then it’s Windows Live Writer. I can only speak for myself, but I know a lot of bloggers who wouldn’t be able to live without this handy piece of software”¦ and now it has just got even better.

Shankar has previously discussed this subject but the latest Windows Live Writer code drop has been released as a technical preview and so I think it’s as good a time as any to go through a few more of the things you do with Writer and describing the changes in this build.

Live Dev stated that “this release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK” but once you load it up and have a bit of a poke around you’ll find quite a number of subtle new features and UI changes. Here is a rundown and a guide to making the best use of them as you can:

Word Count

Yep. This is a bonza one.

In the previous Live Writer getting a word count required a plugin. That was still pretty simple, but more involved then it had to be (such as, select all text> insert> word count).

Now its been added into Writer itself and you can simply go to Tools > Options and select “Show real-time word count in status bar“ to get it displayed just like this:

image

Auto-Linking

This is another great new feature which will save you a lot of time if you find yourself repeatedly linking to the same place. For example I can now set Make Use Of as an auto-link, every time I type it now it’ll be instantly linked to the pre-specified target. You don’t have to worry about your paragraph being filled with identical links either, an option is available to “Link to each term only once per post”.

image

Image Editing

You’ll find a number of additions to image editing in Live Writer. For a start you can now centre your image from the properties panel (this was limited to just three options before) and five new borders have been added; photocopier, reflection, rounded corners, solid 1 pixel and solid 3 pixel.

Better still are a couple new options to crop and tilt images. No more cut-and-pasting into another image editor for a some quick edits, then cut-and-paste back into Writer.

image

Support has also been added for Lightbox“¦ which is great I know, but what is Lightbox?

Lightbox is a script you can install on your blog so selected images are overlaid onto the page, rather then being opened in a new window or tab.

It’s quite popular and I’m sure you’ve recognized it by now. It’s dead simple to set up and if you’re interested here’s how you can do it.

image

image

Have you noticed these settings way down at the bottom of the properties panel?

Writer automatically pastes images with a drop shadow, so if you don’t want that it’s a pain to change.

It’s quite simple to fix, just change the border once then “save settings as default”. I must admit I didn’t notice this one for some time but when I did it sure made things easier.

That’s just a few of the new things you can do with Live Writer, with the updated SKD expect to see some great new plugins soon!

Also see Five Things To Do After Installing Windows Live Writer.

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog Not Waving But Drowning.

Tagged: • •

Laurence John

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  • luciano

    nice one, i’ll try for sure…
    seams pretty cool

  • http://beerpla.net Artem Russakovskii

    I completely agree with the article. I use Live Writer for every post I write and indeed it’s one of the better MS products out there. However, I’m disappointed it doesn’t get more attention and still lacks usability and features. For example, why can’t I change the text size? Why can’t I change the text color? Those are really basic things, and I have to switch into HTML mode to do them. And this really bugs me: I can’t set the defaults for inserting images, so I have to keep changing every image settings every time I paste or insert one.

    Hrm, just installed the new Technical Preview and the top bar just disappears randomly. Thanks for letting us know though, I was wondering where new versions are for a while now.

    • Laurence

      Yea I know… I would say it is the best blogging tool… but it still lacks in many areas and so much could be done to improve it.

  • http://www.shankarganesh.com/ Shankar Ganesh

    The image editing features are fantastic. Previously, I’ve used Photoshop/IrfanView to touch up images a bit. I think Live Writer is getting better that I don’t really have to open up another image editing tool when writing blog posts.

    Thanks for summing up the features, I always wondered why Word Count was missing.

  • http://www.enfotainer.com Manish

    Seems pretty cool blogging tool. I’ll definitely try it!

  • http://makeuseof.com Aibek

    WLW is getting better and better. It’s definitely one of the best blogging client I have seen.

  • http://2bestrong.wordpress.com/ Strong One

    I downloaded it when the new version first came out.. it wasn’t working with a bookmarking plug-in I use.
    I’m going to give it another try today.

  • http://blog.arpitnext.com/ ArpitNext

    Gr8 article !!

    Stumbled !

  • http://www.thepinkc.net Ellie

    Are there any other programs available that have the ability to change font color/size, etc.? Or is there a plugin I can use?

    • http://lethann.wordpress.com Lethann

      Yea, I didn’t notice this at first, but there isn’t an easy way to change the font other than the typical bold/italic/underline. I could edit the HTML but I shouldn’t -have- to.

      After reading this article I downloaded the program but it looked nothing like what is pictured above. Then I went back and took a look at the page. There are two download buttons. A blue one in the upper left and a green one in the middle blog area. To get the Preview version mentioned in this article you have to click the GREEN button.

      One other problem I’m having is that it doesn’t natively handle LiveJournal tags. The “Insert tag” actually inserts a link to the tag list on your blog, not attach the tag to that blog entry. There seem to be no plugins that make use of the LJ extra fields including tags, location, music, & mood.

      I was really hoping for a good cross-posting blog software and seems that once again It’s somewhat lacking. There doesn’t even seem to be an option to cross-post. Very disappointing. Maybe later on they will improve it. One can only hope. At least now I have a good desktop WordPress client.

  • http://aravindablog.wordpress.com/ Aravinda

    I think Zoundry Raven is better than Win Live Writr