Windows Live Writer
6-Dec-2007I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for the last couple of posts. If you’re looking for WYSIWYG editing on WordPress, I can recommend it.
Live Writer grocks your site’s styles (I doubt it can handle coded style extensions, though) so you can get a pretty accurate preview before you post. It automatically handles image uploads, categories, gives you buttons to access the dashboard and comments management and produces pretty spare markup. I haven’t used the video options or any of the other options, but I can acknowledge they’re there.
It even allows me to gratuitously show off my new toy with…
In all, Live Writer has proven to be a very pleasant offline blog editor. Between OneNote and Live Writer, I’m in danger of becoming a Microsoft fanboy!
At risk of starting another multi-post cross-blog flamewar^W spirited discussion, allow me to point out that the web is not WYSIWYG.
The markup is not as bad as some atrocities committed by Microsoft products. But what’s with the s at the end of the sentences? A no-break space followed by a space, WTF?
Where’s the alt tag on the image? In what way is this “ink” as opposed to any old hand-drawn image?
Yes I am being kinda picky. (Not a Microsoft or a WYWIGYW fanboy, obviously…)
Picky picky! The web certainly isn’t, but what other shorthand term would you use for the type of editor WLW is? And the “if you’re looking for WYSIWYG editing on WordPress” was me trying to fend off markup purists.
I write and think better when I don’t have to think a lot about markup. I know that means my writing lacks machine-readable semantic depth, but I’m happy with that and it’s not really the theme of this post, but I’ll bite… a little.
To be fair to WLW, the ink blogging component is a 3rd-party plugin that simply takes the ink format and renders it as an image when published on a blog. Missing alt-text is the plugin’s fault. The original ink is preserved in the WLW plugin so it can be edited and republished from the ink format. The ongoing usefulness of inkblog content is questionable, but it is fast and convenient — things markup zealots should target for immediate elimination ;) Regular images have a generous complement of standard markup to mess with.
The space pairs are due to my 28 year-old reflex and preference for two-spaces-after-punctuation. The non-breaking spaces are generated to preserve the intended formatting when you insert two spaces instead of one after a period. This appears to be common practice for achieving double spaces in HTML. The 160′s don’t turn up when you type, like, proper sentences.
As you’d expect, WLW also provides direct access to the markup so you can manicure before publication, but I haven’t found any unexplainable markup atrocities yet.