Are you one of the dedicated few that are still using Windows Live Writer? Have you noticed that Microsoft has removed the Windows Live Writer plug-ins page?
Back in August 2014, there was a post on Twitter that indicated that there were some advanced discussions about living Windows Live Writer over to open source. But I wonder if that discussion is too late. Microsoft has essentially killed Windows Live Writer by not offering any updates on the software in years.
The Windows Live Writer support forum is all but a ghost town. There are very few new posts coming into the support forum.
What's sad is that Microsoft abandon Windows Live Writer shortly after it was adopted by Microsoft. Microsoft thought they were going to create this new blogging platform, Windows live, to compete directly with WordPress. They thought that if they had a blogging platform and an application that was directly tied to content creation, they would have this enormous new customer base that would drive content creation.
They were partly correct. During the brief time for which Windows live was active, and Windows Live Writer was available, Microsoft was driving a lot of content creation through their platform, but it wasn't anything near to what WordPress was doing. WordPress was a juggernaut of content creation, it was very flexible, very friendly and it was being actively developed. The Windows live platform was all but abandoned directly after it was kicked off.
Essentially, Microsoft has now killed the Windows live blogging platform and now they have killed Windows Live Writer.The biggest question now is to all the people who love Windows Live Writer, loved using it and are probably still using it; what do you do now?
If you're using Windows Live Writer, you know how great the application is for content creation. A lot of people live and die by the fact that they can use Windows Live Writer to publish the content, insert images and use a wide array of plug-ins to insert content. But unfortunately, you can only download Windows Live Writer through the Windows essentials package and you no longer have access to the Windows Live Writer plug-ins website page; Microsoft has taken it down. The only way to find Windows Live Writer plug-ins now is by doing searches through Google.
If you're using Google blogger, it's not great news, but you can still log into blogspot.com and create posts manually with their web based editor. It's excessively depressing because it's not being actively developed and a lot of effort has not gone into it over the past couple of years; it only has basic features/editing.
If you're using WordPress, you have so many more options now in editing and composition of new blog posts with WordPress than you did a few years ago. WordPress offers a wide array of plug-ins for article composition, drag-and-drop images, image optimization and many more. You just have to dig through the WordPress plug-in library and find the plug-ins that you're looking for specifically.
I know one of the key points of using Windows Live Writer was the ability to drag-and-drop images directly into the article, make adjustments to the images or insert galleries. Well, you can do the same things in WordPress, and some things might be a little more complicated, but it can still be done. One of the best changes that were press has made in the past couple of years is the ability to drag-and-drop images. And there are plug-ins that can allow you to drag-and-drop images so that they are fixed sizes when they are inserted; same goes for inserting videos and tweets from Twitter.
Google is slowly making changes to blogspot and WordPress is constantly making changes to their blogging platform. To my knowledge, Windows Live Writer still works with both of these blogging services, but now blogspot requires two-step authentication with Windows Live Writer; there's no option, you have to. And who's to say that WordPress is not going to make changes in the future that could alienate Windows Live Writer users.
I think everyone already understands that Windows Live Writer was very easy to use. Without access to Windows Live Writer those users will be forced to make a choice. If you're using Windows Live Writer and you're becoming discontent, you already know that there's not a lot of options out there for applications that allow you to blog off-line or make it easy to create content.
So honest question is, are you still using Windows Live Writer or have you moved on to something else? And if you moved on to something else, how long did you wait before giving up on Windows Live Writer?
If you have any thoughts or opinions on this, let me know in the comments below...
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