Testing Windows Live Writer

This is a test of Windows Live Writer, a new desktop blogging interface just released by Microsoft. Get your own right here.

Here’s what the “Insert Map” function is like:

Interesting…it offered to let me specify margins, but it doesn’t appear to be respecting that.

The biggest thing I want out of a desktop blogging interface is spell…the #1 feature that WordPress, my platform of choice, lacks.

Wow…the spellchecker worked great…except, it failed to recognize the word “blogging”, even though this is a tool designed specifically to write weblogs with. Funny thing is, it DID have the word “Microsoft” in its dictionary.

So this isn’t too bad…oops, it just moved the map on me for some reason after I italicized a sentence…that’s not good.

So this is okay, but the big question remains…what kind of code will it spew out? Only way to find out is to publish this post. Here we go!

UPDATE: So, even though my blog allows image upload, this program couldn’t upload the map image for me that was supposed to appear above (next to the part where I was talking about image upload). Not sure if it’s a feature or a bug, but at that point it failed to upload my post. I guess that’s cool, assuming the image would be central to the post. However, I’m annoyed by the fact that it didn’t give me any kind of error letting me know the post didn’t publish.

Also…why is the “Publish” button way up at the top of the toolbar, not down at the end (or side) of the main content box?

So far, this gets a so-so grade…maybe a B- or C+. I’ll keep playing with it.

UPDATE AGAIN: So I forgot to categorize the post- then noticed a helpful category drop-down. When I opened it though, I discovered it had imported my categories and is displaying them not alphabetically, but instead in some random order (probably by primary key or something). That’s not that big a deal I guess, just jarring as I’m used to selecting a category alphabetically within WordPress.