Nathan's Occasional Blog

This is a posting from the new Windows Live Writer.  It’s a WYSIWYG blogging editor from Microsoft.  Pretty nifty UI so far … though I’ve only been using it for about 5 minutes.  It will interface with MSN Windows Live Spaces and most of the other popular blogging tools (I use Blogger).

You can check out the dev team’s blog Writer Zone to stay up to date on what’s going on with the package.

 Here’s my first impressions:

1. Great job MS on coming out with a blogging tool … especially one that supports other platforms. 
2. Why isn’t “blogging” in your dictionary for spell checking?
3. Dude – I can copy and paste a picture into a posting!  ROCK ON!
4. Drop shadow effect on images – sweet.
5. Back to the spell checking – why not use the same Word engine that can “inline” check spelling (wrongly spelled word gets a squiggly red line under it)?
6. How do I get more plugins?  When I click the link for More about plugins… in the preferences window I get pointed to a URL that doesn’t work.  At least put a “coming soon” page up.  Right now I get a 404 error from IIS.
7. Can I set the “open in new window” and “rel:nofollow” options in the link dialog to be default for all links?
8. I see you just added a “Blog it” button to my Windows Live Toolbar in IE7b3.  Great idea – but how about you tell me you’re changing things in other programs?

I’m sure there’s more to come, but as of right now I think I just dumped BlogJet.  I still have w.Bloggar around to change my template though.