Craig's Musings

Okay the photo's below have nothing to do with Live Writer, but Live Writer made it super easy to import them.  I stumbled onto Live Writer when I got a Live Messenger upgrade this morning, and I figured I'd give it a try.

I was pretty skeptical it would be useful for me - I assumed it would only target Live Spaces and Sharepoint.  I was wrong, wrong, wrong - I went down the "other weblog" path and after typing in my Movable Type info, not only did Live Writer do the right thing, it even went and detected my style so that my WYSIWYG editing is exactly in the style of my blog.  Very cool.

After passing the first test (configuring), next test was photos.  My pet peeve of all blogging software for Mac or Windows is the lack of good photo support (at least good photo support that also works with 3rd party blog solutions like Movable Type).  While seemingly easy, I have to date not found any software besides RocketPost that works well with photos and Movable Type.  My wish list is a simple one:

• Auto builds thumbnails and larger images (and remembers the sizes I want to use - I don't want to set them every time)
• Supports Drag and Drop  
• Supports effects for image presentation (like drop shadow) and for the image itself (sepia, black and white) (heck, this wasn't even ON my wish list before, but Live Writer put it there)

The only knock (and it is a small one) on Live Writer is that you can't change the default effect, so if you don't want drop shadow around your photo, you have to change it every time you publish a photo.   At first I thought you couldn't control the default sizes, and while you technically can't (the inline photo is always small and the larger photo is always medium), you can click on "advanced" when editing a photo, click on the triangle with a line under it, and then change the default maximum size of small, medium and large photos - which is the same thing, albeit a little hard to discover.

Other stuff I loved:

• As I edit this, I am marveling at how much I LOVE that I am editing in the style of my blog.  It is super, super cool. 
• Web Preview is also super cool - it shows you exactly how your post will look integrated into your full blog page.
• You can insert all the usual suspects (hyperlinks, pictures, maps, tags, video) but they also have plugins - I gave a Flickr plugin a quick spin, and it was pretty cool (albeit it wouldn't let me log onto my Flickr account and so I couldn't see any of my images as they are all private).  And the "Insert Current iTunes Song" plugin is nifty.  I click it, and out comes: While writing this, I was listening to "Lookin' Out My Backdoor" by Creedence Clearwater Revival

I've completely switched over - this ill-attended blog and my family blog are now being published via Live Writer on Windows.  While yes I work for Microsoft in MacBU, I use the best tool for the job I have at hand, regardless of who makes it - and Windows + Live Writer is a home run in my book.

I took the below photos Sunday afternoon before Macworld started. Our marketing team  did a fantastic job: