ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

Recently, I decided to make use of a good blogging software and thus my hunt for a good software started and I chose certain softwares and review them as well. The first one I chose was Windows Live Writer and currently it is in Beta version (Oh my god! finally after such a long time, I’m seeing a software in Beta rather than a website :D). Let’s review this software and lets see where it ranks!

Windows Live Writer, as the name suggests, the software from our favorite and well known company Microsoft. Obviously, if it is from Microsoft we can expect a good and feature rich software and Windows Live Writer is no exception. It is certainly a feature rich and too good to be the best blogging software around. Lets see it’s PROs & CONs :

PROs of Windows Live Writer Beta :

1. Support for most of the blogging platforms : It support most of the blogging platforms and makes sure that it covers almost each and every blogging engine. I’m sure that you’ll find your favourite blogging engine support in this, atleast all of the biggest and trusted blogging platforms.

2. WYSIWYG Editor : It provides WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor and thus it becomes really easy to write the post and you can take control of the things quite easily. It is really really easy to post in a WYSIWYG editor as compared to HTML or XHTML based editor.

3. Template support : One of the most amazing features of Windows live writer is that although, it has WYSIWYG editor but it also has the template support. That means it will display exactly same font, font size, color etc while typing as you’ll see it on the website. It moulds itself according to your defined template and thus you get extra comfort, while writing the blog post.

3. Nice Image Editor : It has got a nice image editor, I won’t call it a big image editor but it has got good options to serve your needs. You’ll need a basic image editor, as simple as Microsoft Paint and it can help you in putting effects like shadow effect and that too quite easily.

4. Support for FTP uploads of media files : It also lets you upload your images or other media files easily through the help of FTP and you don’t have to do anything special for it. Simply insert any image in the posts and it will upload the image on the fly while publishing the post.

5. Tags support for various services : It also lets you put tags in your posts for various service providers like Technorati, Flickr, Del.Icio.us etc. and let you configure new tag providers too. Thus the flexibility is also present in the software.

6. Various small but useful options : It has got extensive list of small but very useful features like Spell checker, auto save, html editing, insertion of maps, blog search engine ping, plugin support etc. The features are extermely good and makes it the perfect blogging software.

CONs of Windows Live Writer Beta :

1. No support of XHTML : Whatever you put in WYSIWYG editor generates the HTML code rather than XHTML code and thus can be considered as a negative. Although, it hardly makes a diffence as all the modern browsers support HTML.

2. No support for Videos from online services : It fails to allow the users to insert videos from the online services like YouTube, Google Videos, Revver etc. However, that can be inserted easily using the HTML interface but if the option would have been given for WYSIWYG then it would have been easy for non-techies as well. Although, there is a plugin which allows users to put the videos from the major online video hosting services.

3. Crashes : It crashes quite frequently and this can be its biggest drawback, because if you are putting your heart out in a blog post and suddenly the software crashes and you did’nt have the chance of saving the post then you have no option but to pull your hair off.

4. No option of saving the posts as file : It fails to allow its users to save the posts as files in a seperate place, although it does show you drafts but doesnt let you choose the place of storing the posts. It can come handy case of crash of software, it happened to me twice when I was writing a big post and it crashed in middle, I was hoping that my post will be saved as it is constantly saved in the drafts but unfortunately it failed to display that post but showed the other already posted posts.

Windows live writer is a good, feature rich and extremely easy to use software and one of the best blogging software around, however just a couple of more improvements in stability will make it the best. Even, less features will be easily accepted provided it doesn’t crash. It is in beta, so we can expect that all the issues will be certainly addressed by the Windows Live Writer team. I will suggest you to use the software, if you don’t experience any crashes then take my words, you will not leave it :)

Links : Windows Live Writer
[tag]ReviewSaurus, Windows Live Writer[/tag]

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