[sc:wordpress-category ]Having now writing quite a few blog posts, I have found WordPress to be, shall we say, annoying to actually edit posts in.
No, that’s not quite right. Web browsers are annoying to edit posts in. the WordPress editor is of course limited to the platform it is written in and as such is quite good within those limits. But lets face it, anyone who has used a desktop word processor knows that all web based editors don’t stack up very well against them.
My search for a better solution started out with WordPress itself, which has a “Paste from Word” option, however I found this to be a poor solution to the problem.
Some googling later found several options, each of which had several pros and cons, however what did surprise me was that one of the options was Microsoft’s Live Writer.
Live Writer is part of MS’s Live Essentials free add-on package for Windows and in fact was already installed on my system. After a quick setup to connect to JumbleCat, I had access to my current posts, drafts and other items right from Live Writer.
Live Writer includes several helpful features that make writing posts more like writing on the desktop, including the ability to write posts offline (I found the extremely useful recently while I was on a flight).
The Good:
- Offline editing
- Native Windows application
- Full WordPress and other blog integration
- Both publishing and draft mode posting supported
- Full support for categories, tags and other items.
- Full preview and source edit modes
The not so bad/not so good:
- Default option is to use a single window for all posts, so editing multiple posts at once is not possible, can be changed in the options menu.
- Default option is to replace quotes with “smart” quotes, which is kind of annoying, but again can be changed in the options menu.
The Bad:
- No ability indent text
- To get the theme from the blog to do the full preview, Live Writer has to create and then delete a post to the blog. It must be possible to get the theme without doing this.
