The other day, it dawns on me that Microsoft has killed all their download links for Microsoft Windows Essentials 2012.
This was a slight problem because I was going to get my son started with doing some video editing with Windows Movie Maker 2012, but the download links were gone. Luckily, I keep a lot of the installers I download; that included the last full installer of Microsoft Windows Essentials 2012.
Hey! Welcome back! This meaning the ability to post posts with Blogger. The Open Live Writer team has updated their software [0.5.1.4]. So, for people still using Blogger, they can be considered somewhat happy again.
If you’re a blogger, and you use Google/Blogger, you should head over to OpenLiveWriter.org and download the latest version.
For the longest time, I was a devout user of Windows Live Writer. I used Windows Live Writer to produce pretty much all of my articles on my website, but as Microsoft decided to lean away from supporting Windows Live Writer, I started looking for other alternatives. As my website [LEHSYS]is based off of WordPress, I started exploring options to produce my articles with that platform, but the experience for producing articles wasn't that robust; it was limited in many ways.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot of off-line blogging applications that are other decent quality. No one has actually stepped forward to produce something that is really a well-rounded option for blogging off-line, or making it very easy for authors to produce content.
The idea of Windows live writer going open sourced is very exciting for me; I think it's a great idea. Microsoft hasn't shown any love for Windows live writer in a really long time. I think the last update to Windows live writer was sometime in 2009. I don't necessarily include a GUI update, without any bug fixes, a serious update to the application.
Reports are coming in that Windows live writer is going to be going open source, and that's great, because I haven't used Windows live writer to compose any blog posts in a while.
Like most of you, I run into issues with theme compatibility, problems with posting, being able to access accounts, lack of appropriate plug-ins, and having to convert my images to JPEG format when composing my blog posts. Those are just some of the things that I think Microsoft should have fixed early on, but didn't.
I was in the Windows Live Writer support forum the other day and I was trying to assist someone who was having problems with posting clear images to Blogger. Apparently the original images that she was trying to attach was fairly large and when she tried to attach them to her blog post, the images looked okay but once the article was published, she indicated that the images that she was working with or had inserted, were now blurry.
This topic got me thinking about how Windows Live Writer works with images that are inserted into blog posts.
Microsoft has finally got off their laurels and brought some organization to the support forums. As anybody knows that has visited the ' Windows live' support forms before, there was a dedicated support forum just for Windows Live Writer, but then Microsoft discontinued the ' Windows live' brand of products. So they transitioned all the support forums from that brand over to the answers.Microsoft.com to be more in line with everything else they offer.
Transitioning everything over to the new support form was the right thing to do, but what they didn't do was create a specific category for the ' Windows live' products, they simply through them into ' outlook.com, sky Drive' category.
In a feat of complete laziness, Microsoft didn't even bother to give products to own category for support. So questions for Windows Live Writer were mixed in with questions with the new Outlook.com; which is stupid.
As an user of Windows Live Writer since December of 2008, I think Microsoft is outright torturing Windows Live Writer users. For reasons I truly don't understand, Microsoft acquired Onfolio Writer made only a few minor updates and then stopped doing anything with Windows Live Writer.
Windows Live Writer is a fantastic offline blogging tool with a WYSIWYG editor. It interfaces with just about any blog service [Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, etc.] If you're a blogger you'll find this tool incredibly helpful- and it's refreshingly free from Microsoft.
When Microsoft was fighting the stupidity of having to deal with the 'live' product line, pretty much all the applications got updates and naming updates— BUT NOT Windows Live Writer.
Windows Live Writer is the definitive tool for most bloggers who want to compose blog posts off-line. It's one of the few applications for Microsoft that's truly embraced for what it is, what it can do and for the fact it's free.
One of the bigger questions about Windows Live Writer over the past couple of years has been that it doesn't have the ability to zoom in and zoom out during the course of the composition phase. Like Microsoft office WORD, you can zoom in and zoom out of a document making the appearance of the document larger, but you're not actually changing the font size of any of the text.
Unfortunately, the updates to Windows Live Writer are few and far between. Even more so, when Windows Live Writer is updated, when the version numbers change, Microsoft doesn't disclose what improvements or corrections is made in the application. People have no idea what changes have been made to the application except for the developers for the application.
I did a search on this today, and I couldn't find anything on it, but Windows Live Writer 2012 now has the option to zoom in and zoom out in the composition phase.
Windows Live Writer has the ability to allow users to see their blog as it'd be posted as they are composing, but what if you were having problems with that; what if you didn't want to see the theme, or if your theme preview wasn't working correctly?
The standard editor for Windows Live Writer; editing with no theme means there's no fancy theme background, no fancy fonts and the width of the composition area.
Forget the graphics of creating a post. What most bloggers need is to roughly see the fonts, the links, images and at the width the post is going to be published. And this applies to any of the Blogging services [Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Etc.] that Windows Live Writer supports.
At times it's hard to explain the issues of why Windows Live Writer can't display a theme correctly. It's multifaceted, but it can be explained with a little effort.
The support forums for Windows Live Writer ask these questions from time to time and it's good to have an example to draw from. In this post I provide the location of the default theme in Windows Live Writer and the location of where the dynamic themes are stored.
Depending on what the sore spot is, the average person should be able to read this and then make some small adjustments, or just create a BASIC theme for themselves.
Windows Live Writer is one of the most popular off-line blog editors the bloggers use. Blog authors love the ease-of-use and the ability to copy and paste images directly into a post and then be able to keep those off-line for reference and do lots of other stuff.
I've noticed over the past couple of years people are always asking about changing this setting or changing that setting, and it really just requires people to jump into the Windows registry, by the Windows Live Writer entry and start making a few changes.
Some people are nervous about getting into the Windows registry but in actuality there's no harm in simply viewing the Windows registry. I've gone into my Windows registry and poked around and take a bunch of screenshots of the settings for Windows Live Writer so people can see what it's settings look like before they start poking around.
Windows Live Writer is a fantastic offline blogging tool with a WYSIWYG editor. It interfaces with just about any blog service [Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, etc.] If you're a blogger you'll find this tool incredibly helpful- and it's refreshingly free from Microsoft.
But for the point of adding images to Windows Live Writer, I thought I would do a quick post on it.
When you're working on a post in Windows Live Writer it's important not to be slowed down by having to mess with a bunch of arduous graphic programs to try to point out highlight and draw attention to certain features and functions.
Windows Live Writer has some basic functions as far as editing goes, but if you really want to get detailed with image markup, resizing and adjusting the quality of the images that are being inserted, and ultimately posted to your blog, being able to edit those images quickly is going to be almost invaluable.
So while Windows Live Writer does have some basic image editing options it actually works better if you have the option to edit the image, while you're in the composition phase, using your own choice graphic editor.
If you were among the many that were using Windows Live Writer 2009, you probably remember having a plug-in bar on the right hand side of the composition window; having direct access to the plug-ins that you have installed for Windows Live Writer. When Windows Live Writer got updated with the new user interface, Microsoft removed the sidebar. A completely asinine thing to do, considering how useful the sidebar was. Additionally, it left a ton of free/open space in the composition window that's holistically wasted.
One of the very first things that popped up in the Windows Live Writer support forums with the redesign of the GUI, was a request to reinstate the sidebar. Of course Microsoft never answered and the loyal users that use Windows Live Writer on a regular basis have been left in the dark ever since.
But you really have to have respect for those independent developers out there that recognize that something is wrong, but it can be fixed with some additional code. Enter JoseNet.
I added a new plug-in to my website the other day called SEO Smart Links to help me with linking to external resources. During the composition phase of an article you sometimes miss an opportunity to insert a hyper-link to a resource. Windows Live Writer has an auto-link feature, but the truth is, it's better to make the change on the server so all the previous posts get the update too. You can't do that with Windows Live Writer.
I continue to be a little bit disappointed with Microsoft's progress on any development with Windows Live Writer. It seems that Microsoft has all but forgotten about Windows Live Writer. there hasn't been any updates to Windows Live Writer in quite some time in the program still lacks the basic ability for a find and replace function.
Having to come to the realization that Windows Live Writer may actually be a dead product to Microsoft, you have to start thinking about what application you're going to move to next. Such a concept is fairly depressing because Windows Live Writer has been such a well received application in the blogging community. It makes the overall blogging process so much easier, if for nothing more than being able to drag-and-drop images into the blog posts and to be able to see generally, what the blog post is going to look like before it's actually published.
The other day, a person contacted my website and they were inquiring about being able to upload images to blogger using Windows Live Writer; they were having a problem.
I knew that Windows Live Writer was compatible with blogger, even the latest version, but there are some nuances to using Windows Live Writer with blogger. Blogger uses Picasa web to store the images that people upload for their blogs. And in order to use that type of storage Windows Live Writer has to create a folder inside Picasa web called 'Windows Live Writer' so when you upload your posts to blogger, and you had images, those images are placed into the Windows Live Writer folder in Picasa web.
The person that I was exchanging communications with was saying that they had checked everything and everything should be fine, but Picasa web was telling them that they were over the limit; that was another issue. In the course of trying to help them though, I found some other articles that were kind of disturbing. I really haven't got a response yet from my question about this to Google, but I'm kind of hoping that they'll get back with me soon.
