Monday, March 9, 2009

A Great Blogging Tool

Single Tulip, open acrylic on Gessobord

Single Tulip

4 in x 4in, open acrylics on Gessobord

not for sale

On my break recently, I made a discovery. It's not like it is a big secret, I just had never taken the time to think about it. I have discovered MS Live Writer. It's a software tool, like Scribefire, to help you blog.  I never imagined that I would use such a thing, seemed like just another complication. But honestly, I love it and wouldn’t be without now.

What you get:

  • Write locally, then publish online.
  • Great image handling software - I have been trying to put images in a table for the "pages" on my sales blog (such as my flower gallery or portrait gallery) - it hasn't worked until I used Writer.
  • Lots of integration with other online apps, plugins etc.
  • My current favorite plugin asks you if you want to update twitter with your new post – you click yes, it goes to twitter puts in your blog title and a shortened url. If you have things set up between twitter and facebook then it will go publish the same thing on facebook. All for one click, awesome!
  • Here’s the official list of features
  • Life Hacker’s ideas about how to use the features
Now, it is true that you wouldn't want to edit the code it generates, but you can edit old posts with it, so you shouldn't ever need to look at the html. It is really helping me dress up my posts, I'm thrilled!

6 comments:

Jeanette Jobson said...

Good idea Rose, I'll have to check out MS Writer. I usually write directly into blogger, so to be able to add more interest in terms of formatting etc would be useful.

Thanks!

Jennifer Rose said...

Looks like an interesting tool to use, thanks :) I can't use it as I'm using Linux but its still a good to know about :)

Rose Welty said...

Jeanette, that's what made me decide to try it. As someone said, it's amazing, a great MS product that's free - very rare.

Jennifer, I'm sure there are some Linux compatible tools somewhere. I hadn't really thought that software beyond blogger would be all that useful unless you were into ads, but I was wrong.

Valerie Jones said...

Thanks for sharing this tip, Rose. I'll have to look into it.

Nithya Swaminathan said...

Thanks for the heads up on MS Writer. Downloaded it promptly and loving it! I hate the blogger editor, so this is great :)

Rose Welty said...

Valerie, have a look, it's a good tool.

Nithya, glad you like it. You can even schedule posts ahead with it.