Yes I know that I said I don't like using Microsoft products any more. But nobody at Firefox Performancing answered my question about FTP overnight on the Forums, so I was pissed off. When I saw that Windows Live Writer had just been launched and that uploading images was included, I thought I had better have a go. Some reviews I had read, said it was hard to edit posts made with Performancing. I guess this is true as the generated html or CSS (I'm not techie enough to tell the difference) does make it harder to read what you wrote.
Installation
The installation was easy. As you might expect, Microsoft tried to make me install all sorts of other things, toolbars, automatic updates etc, so it was hard to stop it, but I think I succeeded. It didn't seem to care that I was running Firefox. Except it tried to install some toolbars which clearly only work with IE. I haven't got the bit of Firefox for running IE yet, so can't try that.
WYSIWYG
It really is. When I told it which blog to post to, it picked up the themes and stylesheets from the blog and here I am writing in green on my beige background with instant orange headlines. That's nice! Makes the rubbish I write look better.
Tiling windows
I tried to make Windows Live tile over the bottom half of the screen like Performancing does, which is really convenient for blogging from webpages. There is no Windows drop down menu on either Firefox or Windows Live to do that. I know Firefox has tabs but what do you do when you have several windows open?
There seems to be some bug on the window display of WL, because you can't see the bottom of the frame to drag it around. There is some tray thing labelled properties and trackbacks.
Onfolio
MS haven't erased all traces of the Onfolio product it bought and relabelled, as the icon in the system tray says Onfolio, and so does the program labelled Onfolio add-in (note the different jargon!?) for Windows Live Tool Bar, which got installed somehow.
Undo
There is an undo item on the Edit Menu but it's only a single undo.
Styles
There's a sort of stylesheet, with "paragraph" and "heading 1" to "heading 6". Does anyone do blog posts with six levels of headings. I only ever use 3 levels even in very long reports. Solutions looking for problems there, I think.
Categories
These have been nicely imported, but not sorted like happens in Performancing.
Image uploading
There are 3 choices: Not to upload (? when you've already included it in the post?); to upload to the weblog; or to upload to the FTP server, with no help on the settings. At least help is offered but it goes off to the blackhole of the Toolbar which I didn't install.
Views
There are 4 views: normal (black and white), web layout, (where I'm writing now, with as near WYSIWYG as I can tell, down to the borders on the blog template), web preview (when the post so far appears in your blog as if already posted, but you can't edit any more) and html code view (which only has the bits of html you have added in the post, presumably everything else is in a stylesheet somewhere).
Insert picture
Let's try the one I used yesterday.
It appears where you left the cursor but it is easy to drag around. And instant import as you are not writing online.
In case you are wondering about the photo, this is a man making filo type pastry in Peja, Kosovo. He stretches it over the roller, then bounces it to stretch it some more on the white table in front, which is actually not a table but a frame with some canvas (?) stretched over it like a drum, with a liberal coating of flour. The photo was taken on my mobile phone, so excuse the bad quality and lack of border when I posted it. We didn't get to see what he turned it into. We couldn't speak Albanian to find out, and unusually, there was no one passing by, who spoke a bit of English, who could answer our questions.
Insert Map
This seems the point to use the offered Windows Map, which is a free offering, to explain where Kosovo is. But unfortunately, the world according to Microsoft does not include Europe. Maybe the fines are beginning to hurt. It seems a bit of an afterthought. There's no taskbar button and it's just stuck on the end of the insert menu.
Spelling check
On the preferences, you can make sure you spellcheck before you post. I don't think I tried the spellchecker, if there was one, on Performancing. True to form, the first spelling error it found in this post was "Firefox", not in the dictionary! It also didn't recognise countries or common blogging terms. Strangely, if you ignore them, then they seem to be ignored next time, as if they were already in the dictionary. Even more irritating is that it insists on American spelling. OK it's only beta.
Preferences
There are preferences for Writer (spelling and publishing) Blog this (some things not at all clear to me, instantly, but look like they are intended as a bookmarker like del.icio.us or diigo) a Plug In option (with an error page when you go to look for them) Web proxy server (for those who blog at work?) and a ping server (which you have to fill in yourself).
Tags
Microsoft has decided tags are called key words, which took me a bit to realise, but no reminder to include them before posting which would be helpful. But then Typepad doesn't either.
Comments and trackbacks
There is a window at the bottom which opens to set these individually or with a default. It's not clear what the default is, or where you set it.
Posting
I didn't experience any problems the first time, but the second time I got an error message about the categories and it just didn't post. The third time, I removed the categories and it still didn't post. The error was Server Error 500 Occurred
Invalid entry ID '12179008' setPostCategories
Summary
As an offline blogging tool, it seems to work. It's really nice to be able to blog with the right layout, style and colours. The help is non-existent but that maybe because I didn't install the toolbar, but I didn't really need it except for the fiddly bits.
On the other hand, that's all you can say. There are some things missing, and nothing special on offer. It's just a wordprocessor for blogs after all. And you don't expect much innovation from Microsoft.
But in the end if it doesn't post properly first time, what use is it to anyone? I had to cut and paste this into Typepad to post it.
