This is a totally geeky post for those with weblogs and the desire to have a good desktop WYSIWIG editor. Feel free to skip it.
Microsoft (obscure shop in the Northwest) has released their Windows Live Writer (Beta), and it’s good. Really good. It’s for posting to several of the most popular types of blog tools, and it found my MT blog perfectly.
Movable Type is a good blog tool, and I keep coming back to it, but the blog entry editor built in (and the WYSIWIG plugin) lack some usability. We work around, but keep looking for alternatives. This Windows Live Writer is a terrific answer (so far). Yes, it pushes the Windows Live product(s), and I don’t use any of them, so feel free to ignore them if you don’t need them. Computerworld has a better review than I could do, so read it when you’re ready. One thing they didn’t mention is that your post preview is perfect, showing just like it would as a new post in your blog. Really neat. And the built-in spellcheck isn’t shabby,
Perfect? No. Pretty darn good? Yes. I’ll be using it.
Oh, there’s no mac version. But you have MarsEdit for the mac, so don’t worry about it.
Thanks so much for this post. I’ve been tearing my hair out using Bligger’s editor, look forward to more pleasant blogging…