I really like Live Writer. I have been using it for some time now to maintain a number of blogs, and I think the advantages of this offline blog post editing tool outweigh the advantages of the online equivalent. I'm not going to go into an in depth feature comparison here, but I will say that one thing I really love is the ability to have plugins. I have installed a number of plugins myself, the two that I use most frequently are Flickr4Writer and Tag4Writer. They are just simple little utilities that generate small bits of html and save you from the drudgery of hand crafting cookie cutter HTML yourself.
What I love more about live writer plugins as a .Net developer, is that it's fairly easy to develop them yourself. There are some fairly good articles on this that I've found, so for anyone who wants to get started writing their own Live Writer Plugins, here is a list of recommended reading.
- Developing plugins for Windows Live Writer by Scøtt Lovegrove
- Writing Plugins for Windows Live Writer - Getting Started
- and of course there's the MSDN documentation msdn documentation
These are all great resources, but the one thing that each one of them fails to mention is that if you are developing on vista with UAC enabled (as you should be), or if you're developing on Windows XP as a least privileged user you need to change the permissions on the C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins folder to allow the user you are running visual studio under to write and modify dll's in that directory.
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