Windows Live Writer: Really Nice Offline Blogging Software
Dec 4th, 2007 by Jon Stahl
Call me crazy, but I just checked out Microsoft’s just-out-of-beta Windows Live Writer offline blogging client, and I gotta tellya, it’s pretty nice. Score one for the kids in Redmond.
It’s free and Windows-only (of course). It offers an easy-to-configure, very polished UI for writing and editing blog posts. It handles cut-and-paste from the web and Word with aplomb. It has a nice little image handling system. It feels quite polished, at least in the first 30 minutes I spent with it. It supports all the major blogging products and APIs.
Plone-related question: it would be cool if we could support uploading of images via FTP or via a blogging API from an offline client. Maybe we can already?
Maybe we can with Quills. Quills supports a widely used protocol that may well work with Windows Live Writer, but pbugni, tomster and I discussed moving to AtomPub at one of the BoFs at the last conference.
The general consensus was that it would be a Good Thing, especially considering the next version of word will have these features built in.
A “save to plone” button would be rather special.
Great idea. Live writer supports the MetaWeblog api which is xml-rpc based, so it shouldn’t be at all hard to do a Plone product to implement metaweblog and then generate the appropriate xml configuration files that live writer wants. You would have some pretty severe limitations on the fields you could set and I guess a single target folder for a ‘blog’.
Jon, this is the future of blogging APIs: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023
FYI–Writer also supports the Atom protocol as of this latest release
You can read details of our support here: http://jcheng.wordpress.com/
Bonnie [MSFT]
AtomPub: good stuff. It’s nice to see Microsoft releasing a product that supports the latest-and-greatest open standards! Thanks, Bonnie!
Jon,
I tried trackbacking this post, but I’m not sure it worked. I posted a reply @ http://quills.sitefusion.co.uk/blog/archive/2007/12/05/time-to-implement-metaweblogapi-newmediaobject