Ok, I know I already posted today but I just read a post about Windows Live writer and I decided I need to give it a try. Partially because I have nothing better to do. It seems pretty cool thus far. It actually allows you to write things IN your blog. As I’m typing this, I am seeing exactly how it will look when it is published which is pretty cool. Just to explore some of the functionality here I’m going to be posting some random videos, links, pictures, etc. Please bear with me.
Fun little side note: I was a little unsure about the correct word usage above (bear with me) so I looked it up. I did actually use the correct form of bear in that circumstance. The website I used to verify this also gave the tip that using the phrase “bare with me” would be an invitation to undress together. I seriously doubt I will every have a hard time remembering that one again.
Ok, adding videos is pretty sweet. Windows writer will link to your YouTube account and you can simply choose videos that you have saved to your account. Also, if you load a video file from your computer it automatically uploads the video to your YouTube account, allowing input of tags and descriptions for YouTube. That’s pretty sweet.
Ok fantastic, I was a little concerned there for a minute. You can’t directly add videos that you have “liked” from your YouTube account but you can add any that you have added to your favorites list. You can also just find a video on YouTube, copy/paste the link into Windows Writer and you’re good to go.
The photo functionality is a little disappointing. I was hoping you might be able to link to a Picasa account similarly to how YouTube links. This is not the case. You can either upload directly from your computer (which works great) or you need to have the direct link to the photo on the web. There isn’t even a way to browse to a photo online to use. I would have thought that it would be fairly easy to integrate some of IE’s functionality into this program and allow you to browse to photos on the web. There are, however, some nice formatting options for photos. It’s fairly easy to change the size, background, border options as well as crop the photo and add some limited photo effect. You can also fairly easily add an external link to a photo, which is pretty cool.
Ooh there’s an option to upload a map to the post as well. I’d better find a way to try that… hold on…. oh, lame. It links to Bing maps. I guess that’s not altogether surprising, being a Microsoft product. That’s rather disappointing though. That could be a really cool feature but I don’t use Bing. I use Google. Like the rest of the world. The rest of the cool world anyways. Maybe I’ll have to play with that and see if you can upload a map from Google to Bing so I can blog about sweet cycling routes in the summer or all of those awesome trips I go on (hey, I should go on some sweet trips.)
This is odd. I’ve noticed that while scrolling through the post if you hit a video or picture, it stops scrolling using the mouse scroll wheel and you have to actually mouse over to the sidebar and scroll from there. Not really a damning glitch but it’s a little annoying. 
YES!!! Old school messenger emoticons FOR THE WIN. That is a definite plus for this program.
The formatting options are nice. It has all the typical windows functionality for text which makes it easy to emphasize things. I can also use all the cool custom fonts I’ve downloaded for Mystery theatre posters and such. Having a spell check built in is nice also because I’m lazy and I sometimes can’t spell. There’s also a word count feature which is essentially useless but kind of cool anyways. I actually checked the word count when I noticed that tool and it was at 666 so if you’re superstitious, you’re going to want to make sure to read past the beginning of this sentence. Good job.
This is kind of interesting. Apparently you can group a whole section to make it a block quote. It seems that it has to be seperated from the rest of the post by a page break though. That’s a little odd but I guess it’s cool. I was thinking that it might be annoying if you wanted to only quote one line but I guess you can just quote one line and make it a separate paragraph.
-Paul
The preview feature is great as well. It’s not really necessary I don’t think since I’m writing on the blog background as we speak but when you go to the preview it puts in all the little sidebars and things so you can see it all. Not hugely important but nice to be able to see. Also it’s nice that it won’t add views to my blog stats which drives me nuts.
Well, I think that about covers it. I think I’m going to go ahead and continue to use this program for now for all my blogging purposes. By the way, this post was really fun. I don’t think I’ve really ever reviewed anything before except short little Yelp reviews. I feel like this was a really good objective review. Plus being able to write the review in the program I’m reviewing was kind of cool and unique. I think I see more reviews in my future. I know, you’re super excited.
See ya later,
-Paul
I think it may just be that you can't scroll over a video. Once the mousey thing that I can't remember the name of at the mome... CURSOR! Once the cursor is over the video it will not scroll. Try just scrolling in the margins it should work.
ReplyDeleteYou can also link multiple blogs (if you have more than one, I have 4) into your Windows Live Writer. You just have to choose which one you want to upload it to. If you ever get more blogs, it's a handy feature. :)
ReplyDeleteI actually did think about the 'cursor-over-the-video' possibility and being smarter-than-the-average-bear tested it. It seems like that's the case but the dead zone of cursor-ness extends the whole width of the page. I have to move the cursor below or above the video/picture (depending on which way I'm scrolling and then it will work.
ReplyDeleteTiffany, I did notice that. :) Thanks!