I have discovered Windows Live Writer. It’s awesome! It’s a blogging tool that you download to your desktop and then you do your blogging thing and it will publish to your blog. Very sweet. I have two blogs (one very personal and this one) and I can post to both pretty much at the same time.
The only thing I don’t like is when you’re in Web layout view you can’t just delete the title to change it. It’s a pain in the butt. And you have to get plugins for some of the functionality you might be used to- I’ve got the digg plugin, technorati tags, and the text template. It downloaded all my categories from here and I can post date, which is nice. The set up looks a lot like MS Word, too.
I think that if someone is making the switch from a Blogger account to a self-hosted WordPress that they should definitely get this to start them out. The layout is a lot like the Blogger dashboard, so it could make the transition easier. I only mention that because I saw in some forums somewhere that people couldn’t understand WP and regretted switching from Blogger (that, to me, is sad because WP rocks my socks).
In case you’re wondering, I’m writing this post in the Live Writer. It’s uber nice. I don’t know any strong reasons why you’d want to use this except that it’s easy and you don’t have to login to your backend to post. Oh, and I like the way it looks. I can’t add site tags, but that’s ok. I like the technorati tags better and I couldn’t find a good enough plugin for that yet (on WordPress 2.3- which made UTW obsolete- so far as I know). I can also get some work done without blog surfing. 
That’s been a huge problem for me so far. I love to read, read, read when I should be writing, writing, writing.
Anyway, I’m not getting paid to write this. I just thought if someone was looking for a tool that would make blogging a lot easier they should know about WLW. Honestly, I think I might just use this from now on. We’ll see.
P.S.
You can’t make a post private through WLW either. So, if you want to write a Private post you’re stuck going to your backend and doing it from there. That’s a little bleh. Other than that, though…
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