Publish and Edit Your WP Posts with Live Writer

Yes I know this has nothing to do with local search but I learned about this great tool and thought I’d post a bit about it.

Live Writer is a new product in the Live family of products from Microsoft. This includes email, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery and a few other applications. It appears to have been conceived and launched by a very small team which likely helps it being a nice targeted application instead of what sometimes becomes bloatware when a big gang gets after something (this is hardly common to only Microsoft).

Live Writer is an off-line tool to prepare and edit blog pages and posting. I am using it with WordPress (hosted, not .com), I know it works with others so check the Windows Live Writer site for more on the other blogging services. My comments and observations relate directly to using a WordPress based blog or web site.

Essentially Live Writer is a blog editor that allows you to create and publish pages and posts directly to your blog. You can also edit and re-publish existing pages and posts as well. What is very useful about Live Writer is it simply works better than the WordPress page or post edit screen. For active users of WordPress you likely regularly curse the speed of the editor, it’s easy to get ahead of your typing and you can sit now and then waiting for things to catch up.

The WYSIWIG screen is really not all that great on WordPress. In Live Writer you have a much more capable, fast and easy to use editing screen (it’s also full screen, not just the number of lines you select in the WP screen setup). You have much more control over the text editing in Live Writer than in WP. You can also select font sizes which you cannot do in WP. Unlike WP you can easily add tables and other formatting features such as bullets are a lot easier to add and edit.

Another big advantage of Live Writer is management of images. I don’t like the way WP brings in an image, it compresses it and the image loses some quality. Live Writer allows much more precise manipulation of the image and allows a number of special effects such as tilting the image a bit. For blogs and sites that want a more fun look with images Live Writer is really handy!

Once you are done with your editing you can publish it to your blog in a few moments. If you have more than one blog you can publish the page or post to more than one site quickly. If you manage a number of sites this is a great feature.  You can also easily see what your post or page will look like with the template of each individual site before publishing.

There are about a 125 plug-ins available. Certainly a drop in the bucket compared to WordPress yet I suspect there will be many more coming soon. Of course the plug-ins are directly related to editing process not all of the other things that are done in WP.
One thing I did find to be a shortcoming (and I may have missed something) is the ability to add the meta title, description and keywords easily. I use the All in One SEO plug-in (like many WP users) and I wish there were the fields in Live Writer to just add this information and have it published to All in One SEO. Like I say, there might be a way and I have missed it but I just go to the just published post or page and add the fields that way. Yes, it’s a bit annoying but it works. I know I’ll find a way to get through this one!
All in all I enjoy this new Microsoft tool. If you want to make preparing blog posts and pages easier and make them look better then download Windows Live Writer.

Update: About 10 minutes after I posted this there was a comment from Michael Torbet who is the author of All in One SEO pack. He directed me to a Live Writer to All in One SEO bridge.

For full details on installing and using this bridge see the directions on the author’s blog. Read them from start to finish because you have to install a WP plug in and a Live Writer plug in.

Thank you Michael! For those of you who use Michael’s work consider making a donation, he does great work!