No question for me that Windows Live Writer is the best product to come out of Microsoft’s Live project/platform/whatever. The Writer Zone blog announced today that there’s a new release available.  It’s a CTP (Community Technology Preview), not a stable release because they’ve added a bunch of new SDK plugin stuff along with the updates to Live Writer itself.

Steve Hodson has a great post outlining all the new features in the application, there’s heaps of great stuff in there, including some little things like recognising what lighbox plugin you’ve got installed on your blog & allowing you to set the images to use this.  The Auto Linking features is also cool, an automatic glossary.  Download the installer here.

Microsoft released the 1.0 version of Windows Live writer this week, which wasn’t much of a change on the last beta, just a couple of new features, including spellchecking for English (US, UK, Canadian), French, German & Spanish and support for AtomPub.  Good though, I’m glad they’re supporting it & not left it in perpetual beta.  Especially since WordPress updated to allow tag creation based on WLW keywords, WLW has become hugely useful for me.

I’m still not a huge fan of the whole Live.com web interface, it just looks a bit weird to me.  Oh well, I can’t really talk about quality design skills anyway.

Also released was the ability to sign up for a live.com (.au/.uk/.etc..) email address.  When I first went to the signup page it set me up as a .co.uk user, I guess because I’ve got my language set as British English somewhere.  Easy to fix though, just change the mkt=en-uk to mkt=en-au.  Not really a user-friendly option though, but I couldn’t find any other way to change it from that page.

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New WordPress release, minor revision number update.  There’s a bunch of bug fixes, security patches and speed improvements, but the best new bit is that now your blog will turn Windows Live Writer keywords into tags for the post.  Once again showing why I love using WordPress, the developers aren’t just inward looking.  They’re seeing what’s else is out there that people use, and adding features to work with them too.  None of this "not invented here" complex.

Note: This is not the ‘Insert Tags…’ link on the WLW sidebar, that will still insert the Technorati (or whatever) links inside the div with the GUID id attribute (why does it do that?).

To get the WordPress tags working, view the properties bar (hit F2 inside WLW or click the little up arrows next to the ’set publish date’ box. Then put the tags you want into the keywords field, comma separated.  When you publish the post, the keywords will be turned into tags on post.

Great simple new feature that makes it just that little bit easier to post.  I no longer have to go into the WP post edit page to update the tags for a new post, in fact, I rarely go to the edit page at all now.

As an aside, does anyone know how to change WLW so that it’s the keywords field that shows up by default at the bottom of the new post window instead of the set categories drop-down?

After the release of the 2nd beta of Windows Live Writer, one of the other changes I noticed was that the blog side panel was now customised for WordPress.  It had a little WordPress icon & it knew where the admin page was located.  This, I discovered, was due to the fact that WLW now has an API for customising this panel with a manifest file. The WordPress.com blogs already have one done for them, with custom buttons to their comments & stats, but I figured, why not the rest of us WordPress users too. 

So I have a very beta plugin that will generate a wlwmanifest file for your blog.  It utilises a lot of the imagery from the WordPress.com one, so I hope they don’t mind.  You can download the plugin here. Here’s the page for it on WordPress.org.

This is very much a case of me working out an idea.  If you have any suggestions for what this can do, please leave a comment.  I’ve got a couple of ideas, but we’ll see how it goes.  It’s all together possible that this may be in the pipeline for the WordPress core, and that would be great.

[inspired by Tim Heuer's subtext version]

I’m pretty happy with Microsoft’s Live Writer program, I’ve found it to be a surprisingly powerful & flexible blogging client, despite Chris Pirillo panning it. While it has all the usual WYSIWYG bells & whistles, the best part about it is the fact that they’ve provided an open API to allow plugin development. This is great, and there’s a few really handy ones already written, Insert Code & Multiple Tags, which is part of the Windows Live Writer Plugins project on Codeplex. There’s a list of plugins on the Windows Live Gallery & on Codeplex. There’s also the Windows Live Writer Plugins blog, which has a lot of great content on how to use Live Writer.

So I’ve written up a plugin to insert bible verses into Live Writer.  It’s utilising the excelent ESV web service. It works so well for the Verse of the Day Wordpress plugin, so why break a trend? Actually, I’d very much like to add other versions to this plugin, but it’s difficult to find decent bible APIs, which is a great pity. If anyone knows of any other publishers providing a web service interface to their text, please drop a comment my way. I’ve designed this plugin to accommodate multiple bible versions, it’s just turned off in this release because there’s only one there!

You can download the installer program from here, but all it does is drop one file into the Live Writer plugins folder, so you can skip the installer and just grab this zip file and extract the plugin file into c:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\plugins (assuming that’s where you installed Live Writer).

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Update: This is now redundant as the new release of FeedDemon detects Live Writer as a blogging client natively.

Microsoft have released a beta of their new blogging client ap, Windows Live Writer.  Haacked likes it, as does Hanselman, even if it does look a lot lke BlogJet.  For myself, I think it’s great, especially as, while it was designed for Spaces, it works with pretty much any blogging system.

The only annoying thing about it is that, unlike BlogJet, if you setup an ‘Blog this News Item’ command in FeedDemon to point to the writer executable, it doesn’t pick up the content from FeedDemon.  This is a pain, and hopefully will be fixed in a later release.  But if not Nick has said he will be sorting this out in the next release. Until then, I’ve got a little application that will act as a proxy between FeedDemon & Live Writer.

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