The most popular blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress use a dashboard that includes a online blog editor, but it’s slow and hard to work with. A much better alternative is to use desktop clients such as Windows Live Writer to blog offline in the same manner as you use Outlook to compose emails offline.
Windows Live Writer (WLW) is a desktop blogging client which allows you to write blog posts from the convenience of your desktop without logging into your blogs admin section. Microsoft has recently launched the latest Wave 3 beta release of Writer.
Benefits of Blogging with Windows Live Writer:
- Supports multiple blogging platforms: You can publish to most major blog services including WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal and many others and not only to Microsoft’s own Live Spaces and Sharepoint. You can also post to multiple blogs as themes are automatically detected for each blog.
- Auto configuration: Writer auto detects your blogging platform and configures itself for it by downloading your settings & theme from your blog. Just enter your blog URL and Writer does the rest. Your blog’s categories and tags are also integrated automatically.
- WYSIWYG Editor: Writer provides an option of typing your post in “Web Preview” mode allowing you to see how your posts will appear in your blog’s theme, even when you’re offline!
- Photos, Videos & Maps: You can insert photos and videos, maps, tags and lots of other cool content to your post. Powerful editing features include tables, spell checker, and quick hyperlinks.
- Blog Offline: You can create and edit a blog offline without a internet connection & then post directly from Writer when you get back online. This also helps you to save on your ISP as well as your webhost bandwidth charges.
- Plugins: You can use plug-ins from Windows Live Gallery to add more rich content to your blog like music feeds, Flickr photos, emoticons and quotes of the day.
Alternative ways to blog:
Interestingly, if you do not want to use Writer, then the next best offline blogging client comes from the Microsoft stable itself in the form of Microsoft Word 2007. You can directly publish your Word document to your blog from within Word 2007 by using the “File – Publish to blog” option. Word 2007 also supports most of the popular blogging services.
Other lesser known free offline blogging clients include BlogDesk (does not support Blogger), Post2Blog (no longer developed or supported), W.Bloggar and Zoundry Raven. But we would not recommend any of these clients ahead of Windows Live Writer.
BlogJet and Ecto are the paid options available but with Windows Live Writer available for free why would you want to pay for blogging?
Firefox comes with the Scribefire blogging plugin but it does not support offline blogging. Flock also has a feature to enable offline blogging from within the browser itself.
If you are using Blogger, then you have the option of using Blog.gears in conjunction with Google Gears to blog offline. However, with WordPress, Google Gears merely stores the script libraries and CSS files on your local hard drive to speed up blogging online.
Conclusion:
There is no better (and cheaper) way to blog either online or offline than Windows Live Writer. Download the latest version of Writer and blog away!
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