New Version of Windows Live Writer

In my quest to integrate Drupal with Windows Live Writer, I had a chance to have a call with some members of the development team from Microsoft. So, first, here’s a shout out to Becky, Brandon and Joe of the Writer team. We spent almost an hour talking about Live Writer and what we might be able to accomplish in the future for Drupal integration.

First, let me say, the goal of the Writer team is to make a product that is great for the end-user. They want it to be easy to use and as feature rich as possible. Because the goal is to provide a tool that integrates on as many blogging platforms as possible, there are inherently some challenges and we had an opportunity to talk about some of the key components they have implemented to make integration more readily available.

Because of our conversation, I think we’ll be able to have some better integration with the Drupal Blog API module for Windows Live Writer… hopefully we’ll be able to get those released very soon.

I wanted to let you know of a new version of Windows Live Writer that the Writer team turned me on to today. I have been a fan of WLW for some time. There are other blogging tools available, but I really do think that this is the best one out there. Now that we can create any node type in Drupal, it makes it an even more powerful tool.

Go over to http://download.live.com/writer/ and download the latest beta version of WLW. If you go through normal download channels, you won’t get the latest Beta. Normally, I shy away from Betas but with the Writer teams assurances, I downloaded it. I have posted a number of blog posts, including this one, from the new Beta and works great. The interface is a little different, but the formatting options are more accessible and I really like how it handles the categories. The have added some really cool effects for image handling. They have designed it so that you can use your keyboard to quickly selected all of the categories you want.

Here are some of the shortcuts you can use in the new Live Writer for categories.

Step 1.

Use Shift-Control-C to open the category menu

Step 2.

Start Typing to automatically search for your category of choice.

Step 3.

You will see the option that you can select with a shaded background. You can hit enter to select your category and then backspace to start typing another

Step 4.

There are two ways to exit the menu. Option 1 is to hit escape. Option 2 is when you are selecting your last category, you simply hit Control-Enter. It will select the last category and close the menu.

So, my hat’s off to the Writer team on this one. This really is a great product.