Coming to You via Windows Live Writer (Beta)

While doing my nightly "blog walking" I stopped at Wes's and found a link to this little handy dandy thing that I am using right now to post this entry. Wes also referred his reader's over to Mike's who posted about Windows Live Writer (Beta) and gave more details on how it works. According to Mike the release was today and already there are some plugins available for download to Live Writer. Miker refers readers to go here to learn about the new plugins from Tim Heuer which at that time he didn't exactly have them ready, but now he does. He's developed two plugins: one for Flickr and one to add tags to entries. Ain't this cool?

Okay let's take a little tour of this thing together, shall we? First I am able to use the font that I like without having to go into the html and change it. All I do now is go up to "Format" and change the font, style, and size from there. It would be alot easier if was in the toolbar above the writing area, but right now I'm not complaining. Second, if you are one that has multiple blogs, with this you are able to add multiple blog accounts and post to each one. I'll see how that works when I get ready to publish this entry. Third, you're able to add photos in you entries and add borders. Example: This photo here was added easily (cannot add photos when uploading to blogger) and there are some nifty things that you can do with your photos. It automatically rotated the photo for me. You can choose the position where you want your photo to be: right, left, or inline. You have choices of borders: drop shadow, photopaper, and inherit from weblog (that's the one I chose so we'll see how it works). You can choose the size of your photo to be small, medium, large, or original. And here's a neat thing. You have options for overlays such as: watermark (which is what I went with) or transformations (black and white, sepia tone, adjust temperature, color pop, sharpen, gaussian blur, and emboss). Of course you can add links with ease and you can also insert a map (cannot add photos when uploading to blogger).Have I wowed you yet? I know just by doing this that I am really going to like this thing. Okay, let's see what else? There is an option of weblayout. This means your working area inside of Live Writer. You have the option of choosing normal, web layout (which is your space's theme in the background), web preview, and html. Okay, what else is there? You can add the urls to whatever your ping service is and there is a spell checker. Okay am I forgetting anything. Oh yeah. Let's see if the Flickr plugin works by adding this photo of mine: (cannot add photos when uploading to blogger, but plugin does work). I know I'm overlooking some things but right now I can't think of anything else to say except that I'm sold! This is something that I will most certainly be using and will probably remove the Zoundry blog writer that I have installed. Why not download this and give it a try for yourself.

Later