live_writerOne of my biggest hurdles to sitting down and writing a good healthy blog post is, simply put, WordPress’ rather cumbersome writing interface. While I’m usually a huge proponent of open-sauce software first, I think Microsoft may be onto something with it’s Live Writer software. I’ve been using Outlook/Express and, recently its successor, Live Mail to make my access to my email account less of a www-URL-hunting endeavor, so the progression of writing a quick blog post with a dedicated desktop app seems pretty natural (to me).

My initial reaction is that the Live Writer is a huge help in terms of catching in-line typos, with its on-the-fly spell checking. Yes Firefox has this feature, but that’s a browser dependency. Also, Live Writer makes it fairly painless to add pictures to the post. And lastly, Live Writer includes a tool for generating tables. To me, this is huge. WordPress’ TinyMCE lacks any default table creation functionality, forcing the use of straight HTML editing to create tables in posts.

If anyone has their favorite blog post writing software to recommend feel free to let me know, I’d be interested in drawing a comparison between what various products have to offer.

Until next time!