I’ve been trying out the Windows Live Writer (beta) for a few days, to try and overcome some of the frustrating limitations of writing and editing blogs online.  I had some frustrations, especially in the realm of embedding photos, but the latest Update release seems to have solved those problems, so I’m ready to endorse the product wholeheartedly!

The first advantage of using a "rich" client application rather than a "reach" web site, is the availability of offline storage.  I’ve lost my work several times when "Save" falls prey to network issues.  I often write longer posts in an email message and paste them in so I have backup copy if something goes wrong.  Windows Live Writer has a Save Draft which saves it locally on the file system - much less likely to encounter problems.

Windows Live Writer integrates delightfully with Spaces.  One can create a post, publish it or post it as a draft with one click (minimal one-time configuration required), or open an existing post right of the blog for editing and reposting.  Sweet, an rich client experience no more complicated, and a lot more responsive without having to download all the fancy graphics, than the online experience.

You can view the content as you edit it in several ways: Web Layout, which shows you the content styled just as it will appear in the blog (it downloads the style of your blog and faithfully reproduces it in an editable fashion), or an HTML Code view in case you need to tweak the source (which I’m finding much less necessary now).  There also is a "Normal" view which isn’t styled like your blog, but I honestly don’t know why one would choose this option - maybe it makes more sense with non-Spaces blog editing.  There’s a Web Preview view as well, approximating the entire blog page with the content in place - not terribly necessary since Web Layout works so well.

You can also edit some properties unavailable in the online version - like the date and time of the blog.  The HTML generated is much nicer than the HTML editing control too, namely it actually uses <P> elements instead of forcing everything to a <DIV>, eliminating much of my manual work after completing a post.

Image insertion in the online version is a major, major pain.  Did I say major?  One would have to leave the page (or open another and get into edit mode), choose a photo album, edit it, add a photo, browse to the photo, upload it, view the photo album, right click and get the property sheet, copy the URL, go back to the blog and edit the HTML to insert and <IMG> tag.  In fact it’s such a pain that I mostly upload the photo to Flickr instead and copy and paste the suggested HTML fragment right from that page in.  Then you right click the image and go through a nested set of context menus to set alignment so the text wraps around the right way.  And then you edit the HTML to add hspace attributes

But image insertion is totally, totally awesome in Windows Live Writer.  You click "Insert Picture…" and choose your picture off the hard drive, and it appears.  Click on it, and you get a full set of image properties in the task bar - alignment, links, alt text, size (need little small/medium/large with a way to customize what those mean).  When you post or publish the entry, the photo gets uploaded to a photo album along with the post.  Trivial, as it should be.

There’s a spell checker (which I miss greatly in the online version, and you probably miss it even more when I mistype.)  There are some new features I haven’t really played with yet, such as a Flickr browser plugin and a tagging facility, I’ll have to explore those later but they sound pretty cool.

So after all those praises, I have a few very small nits with the program and it’s Spaces integration so far.  First, there is a neat facility for setting the margins around images - something I always have to do in HTML mode.  However, although it sets and shows the margins nicely, when posting the entry Spaces strips out the markup.  I have to go back and add in "hspace" attributes which are so obsolete they sneak past Spaces’ defenses.  I hope Spaces fixes this soon.

There is a nice feature that automatically applies a blurred drop shadow to your image before uploading too.  However, when you apply it it shrinks the photo area so the photo + drop shadow is the same size as the original photo was.  The photo body is shrunk and gets blurry as a result.  It would be much nicer to add the border without changing the size of the photo body.

There are some nice useful image controls too like rotating, adjusting brightness and applying a watermark, but along with it comes some features I can’t believe anyone would find useful like Gaussian Blur and Emboss effects.  Seems wasted to me.

All in all, Windows Live Writer rocks.  It is fast and lightweight just like the content one would use it on, and beautifully simple for simple things while having a smooth transition to more advanced features, and very little that you’d never find appealing.  Well done!