I've been using Windows Live Writer Beta, for a couple of months now. I've come to love the simplicity of it. Still, it's very powerful and has a lot of 3rd party plugins that are available to make your blogging experience even better.
I use typepad for my blog, and have found myself very frustrated when trying to insert a picture from the typepad editor. With Live Writer I can insert a picture and size it the way I like, and it's very easy.
There is a great plugin for dropping video straight into your blog from YouTube or Google Video, or a number of other video sites. Without this tool I refused to try to embed video... it was just too much of a pain, now it's easy.
Another great feature is the hyperlink tool, it gives you some great options, that you would need to rip into the html code to get in most editors. For instance, there's a simple checkbox for opening link in a new window, there's also a place to insert alt tag text.
I'm also impressed by the by the ping server feature, which notifies servers when you post an entry on your blog. To use this feature, go to Tools -> Preferences -> Ping Servers. Here is the list of known servers I ping:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.feedster.com/pinghttp://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
Once you've finished with your post press the Publish button and you're done. It will pop up your updated webpage when you finish, it couldn't be easier. All in all I think Live Writer Rocks!
You could replace most of those with Pingomatic, a pinging service from a couple of the developers behind WordPress. Less services to ping = quicker posting/load times, at least with WordPress. Give it a try: http://pingomatic.com/
Posted by: Justin Moore | March 29, 2007 at 09:21 AM
Justin,
Seems to me that the only way to use pingomatic from outside wordpress was to go to a webpage and check boxes and submit a ping for each post.... has that changed?
Posted by: Ed Buford | March 29, 2007 at 12:01 PM
Not at all. It's a ping service just like any of the other ones you've listed, but now that I'm looking around, it doesn't appear to well documented. I believe the URL you want to ping is http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
Hope this helps.
Posted by: Justin Moore | March 29, 2007 at 03:11 PM
Glad you like Writer!
Nothing wrong with Ping-o-matic (although it isn't the most reliable service in the world), but Writer doesn't make you wait around for the pings to go through--they happen in the background after the publishing progress dialog goes away. We did this specifically because some of the ping servers can be very slow to respond when they get overloaded or attacked.
Posted by: Joe Cheng [MSFT] | April 03, 2007 at 10:15 PM
The only improvement I'd like to see to Live Writer is a spellcheck / grammercheck more like the one in word.
I really love the product!
Thanks for stopping by.
Posted by: Ed Buford | April 03, 2007 at 11:54 PM
Great site!d21c989edc4568e339fda14ec07caa6f
Posted by: Alex Fetcher | November 02, 2007 at 12:44 AM
OK, let me repeat that… I can be sensitive about my airports meeting A joke for you! How do you revive a drowning rodent? Give it mouse-to-mouse resuscitation.
Posted by: Enarmanolam | November 05, 2008 at 05:11 AM