Away From Home With Windows Live Writer

Are you ready to add some power to your blogging workflow away from home? If you’re like most bloggers, your workflow looks a little like this:

- Check your RSS reader

- Compose your post

- Add photos, tags, and any relevant TrackBacks

- Check your statistics and other data

- Move on to read and comment on other blogs

But what if you're not within easy range of an internet connection? Whether you're away from home in a rustic mountain cabin or on an airplane, you don't have to lose time waiting until you're at the local internet café to write your blog posts.

Composing your blog posts offline with the free desktop client Windows Live Writer is an easy way to make sure that TypePad goes wherever you do.  Additionally, once you have downloaded the client and completed the easy setup, you only need to launch the program and start writing; with an abundance of plugins in the Windows Live Gallery (which you can browse here and here), you won’t need to switch to another tab or window to find many of the photo and video codes that you might need. 

Featuring a WYSIWYG Rich text editor, the environment in Windows Live Writer will be familiar to you as a TypePad blogger. Because it offers support for TypePad Pages, as well as Categories, Excerpts, and Extended Entries, you won’t even have to change the way that you blog. The inline spell check ensures that your proofreading will be an easy task, and if you need to present your data in a column, you can insert tables easily.

Using photos in your posts will become a particularly pleasant experience with Windows Live Writer. Just insert a photo from your computer’s hard drive, then add borders and special effects. If you like, you can even create an album for your photos right on your blog; you only have to select the style and sit back while Live Writer does the rest.

There’s no guesswork involved with Live Writer. The live preview feature allows you to see exactly what your post will look like once it has been published, down to the fonts, colors and formatting. Add it all up, and Live Writer’s built-in features may give you back some of the time and productivity that you're missing by being in-flight or at a remote location.

You can read more about Windows Live Writer and download it for free at http://download.live.com/writer

Comments

[Geo]

In the past beta version, Windows Live Writer did not want to play nice with TypePad. In fact almost any word processor-style editor doesn't really seem to play nice with TypePad, especially when trying to use something like special characters - such as umlauts, tildes, and EM dashes - or symbols or even the dreaded 'curled quotation marks' that translate into meaningless ascii nonsense or arbitrary blobs once uploaded to TypePad.
Whenever I have written a post in, for example, Word I have to spend twice as long 'fixing' it in TypePad before publishing it.
Is this going to be a problem using the new Live Writer? Writing posts twice and not being able to use the standard special character sets available to word processing for almost two decades can be a real drag.

[Brianna]

Hi Geo!

Thanks for bringing up this great point. In the past, some users have had trouble with the beta version of Windows Live Writer. Recently, however, we have not heard many, if any, complaints. Whether or not a piece of software will work for you can often depend on your computer's settings, but if you want to try it out, and do experience issues, make sure to open a Help Ticket and we'll be glad to help you figure out what the problem is.

You brought up the example of Word, and I'm going to take a minute to address the fact that Word is a word-processor application that uses Microsoft-branded code. The issue when trying to compose in Word is that this code is pasted into TypePad's Rich Text editor. This isn't a unique issue with TypePad--issues related to the Microsoft code will be found when pasting into any Rich Text editor.

The Live Writer, however, does not insert proprietary code from Microsoft, so it plays very nicely with TypePad these days.

If you're really interested in comparing the two, we'd love to hear your feedback in composing with Live Writer versus Word, and how the two work with TypePad. Feel free to open a ticket and share your findings! :)

[David Saunders]

Live Writer is the one and only reason I bought a PC recently! Mac do not have a prog as good as Live Writer for publishing to Typepad - or do they?

I tried a couple of things but they were crapola.

David

http://www.joetheseo.com

[Geo]

I'll certainly give it a test run. Microsoft have always been 'proprietary-heavy' so there's a certain amount of apprehension, due in part to the fact that 'Microsoft' and 'works with...' are not often compatible terms. I tried to use the beta of Live Writer and found it was more effective to just wait until I logged into my TypePad account and blog as usual.
Perhaps the non-beta release will have been greatly improved.
Thanks for the info!

[Michelle Wegner]

I use Live Writer every single time I put up a post. I find the editing of photos and text to be very user-friendly.

[Geo]

Oh. And an FYI to anyone wanting to try this out: you will find that it is the typical Microsoft 50+ minute download/install and, though you *choose* to install just Live Writer, it will arbitrarily disregard your choice and download six collateral and likely extraneous bits of software right along with Live Writer. Just throwing that out there in advance so you're not surprised and irritated at the length of time you will spend.

[Account Deleted]

I had trouble with the beta versions, but this version looks clean. Installation was easy and fast, just skip all the additional baggage apps you may not use. Setup went smooth, and WL found my TypePad blog and logged right in. WL interface is easy to use and has just about everything I'd need to write a post.

If no bugs pop up, I'll be using this very often to post. Thanks for the heads up.

John

[MELANCHOLIA]

Thanks for this useful suggestion. I've been testing the Windows Live Writer application for 3 days now and I must admit that it works fine. This stuff is easy and user-friendly. For sure, I'm gonna use WLW often to post.

[Rozanne Paxman]

I've tested it on two computers now - my big desktop and on the Netbook (MSI) that I use while I am traveling. It worked great on both machines. Inserting photos into the blog posts is so much easier and since my posts are usually heavy with photos, this improvement has saved me a lot of time, particularly when I was posting while I was traveling.

Thanks for telling us about it.

[Andrew Denny]

I love Windows Live Writer! However, it refuses to upload posts for future publishing to my Typepad blog. I have to save as a draft and then go to the blog and fiddle with the publishing date there.

Is the fault with WLW or the Typepad API?

[Account Deleted]

I love WLW, too, but found recently that if i publish from it to my typepad account that it wouldn't update on Facebook or Twitter... Is that still the case? I'm not at home to check my actual computers to see if my WLW is still the beta version, but I was sad because, since I prefer creating my posts in WLW, I would create the post in WLW and then would have to copy to the typepad publisher in order to update on FB and Twitter. It's just one extra step, but if that step were eliminated with the new WLW, I'll be a very happy camper.

[simonj]

if it works as described, i can definitely use this. i'll give it a run. i do more stuf all the time when i'm on the move, so it's great to see that they're building tools like this.