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Windows Live Writer

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The Windows Live team released a new tool for editing and creating blogs yesterday called Windows Live Writer (WLW).  I am using it right now to post this entry, and I am impressed.  It supports WYSIWYG editing, saving drafts of my posts, inline photos, and -- can you believe it? --  support for multiple blogging engines: Live Spaces (of course), Blogger, and many others.  Any blog site that supports the Really Simple Discoverability (RSD), Metaweblog API, or Movable Type API is supported out of the box.  With this free tool and the upcoming Word 2007 release, Internet Explorer now offers a set of professional tools for blogging.

So why does this get mention on the IE blog?  Because if you have the Windows Live Toolbar (WLT), WLW installs an add-on.  The add-on is a custom button for the Windows Live Toolbar with options to blog the current page, create a new post, or open an existing post.

Windows Live Writer add-on for IE7 in the Windows Live Toolbar

Custom buttons allow developers to use the Windows Live Toolbar to extend the functionality of IE.  This gives you a chance to add features that the IE and WLT teams have yet to invent.  With a little XML, you can add a button that searches the Internet, opens an arbitrary web site, displays information from your web site, or performs actions from a custom drop-down menu.  The documentation and samples are available on MSDN, to get you up and started quickly.

The Windows Live Writer team took advantage of these extensions to create a "Blog this page..." button.  Clicking on that button starts Windows Live Writer and opens a new post on your personal blog.  This gives quick access to your blog, directly from within the IE browser frame window.

What will you do with custom buttons?  Give Windows Live Writer a try, and take a crack at custom buttons.  Share your ideas for other custom buttons below.

Mark Harris
Lead Program Manager

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    sample the name housting below

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    The custom buttons sound like a nice way of quickly adding functionality but this sort of customisation should be built into IE directly instead of requiring Windows Live Toolbar (or any other toolbar).

    I don't like clutter in my browsing experience and I run IE7 with the only addition to the standard items being a button for MS Fiddler that I use for debugging my networking code.

    Mog

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    Just installed and used Windows Live Writer.  Have to say that everything went great.
    I do, however, find it ironic that when I used the built-in spellchecker to check my post, the only "errors" that it found where the words "blogging" and "blogger's."

    Also, I like the Live Toolbar's added tabbed browsing functionality.  A couple of months ago I "upgraded" to IE7 and really loved the tabs but had to "downgrade" back to IE6 because IE7 couldn't handle a few sites that were quite important to me (partner.microsoft.com being one of them).  Nice to have the tabs back.

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    これまで写真つきのブログ記事を投稿するのがとても面倒だったのですが、この Windows Live Writer が解決してくれそうです。 ・・・というか、これはもう手放せなくなる予感。この記事も Windows Live Writer で書いています。 Windows Live Writer は WYSIWYG (ブログに表示される状態で記事の編集ができる) のエディタです。 なんと自動的にブロ...

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    I agree that it would be great if IE itself supported the Windows Live custom buttons.

    (IE does have its own custom button functionality, but it hasn't been updated at all since IE5 (1999), and Live's buttons seem to be more flexible, powerful, and sharable.)

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    It is a cool blogging tool.
    It would be beter even if Google would complete their standardized API to Blogger as currently it does not allow for pictures to be updated from the live writer yet.
    The code must already be in place as they made sure that an other google product namely Picasa does update pictures to blogger.

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    AjaxTags XUL+Javaでリッチアプリケーション - ZK 2.0 h...

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2006
    Sorry for being harsh, but why don't you put this energy into getting a complete and solid browser out of beta.  Or is IE7 going to go the way of web 2.0 and be in a permanent state of Beta never taking over a dominant share from IE6 leaving a smattering of browsers that all have different issues.

    Seriously, blogging software?!  Other's have already done it better and people are going to be hardpressed to leave blogger and wordpress.

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2006
    JWin -- You do realize that Windows Live Writer is made by a different team than the IE team?

    The IE blog folks are just pointing out something else web-related that other people in the company are working on.  Give them a break.

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2006
    jsminch - You can install IE7 and make it identify itself as IE6 so that sites not supporting IE7 will not know the difference. Just install IE7 and add the following registry entry: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings5.0User Agent" and then create a string variable named "Version" with a value of "MSIE 6.0"

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2006
    Yea I've tried that. my first post was successful. but sometimes it's showing proxy error. sometimes it's working fine... :(

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2006
    I really can't beleive the buzz over this new tool by the Windows Live team.  I was browsing over...

  • Anonymous
    August 20, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2006
    A cool tool I now use as my primary blogging editor.

    Some things 'missing'

    1.Spell checking on the fly (ala Word).
    2. A spell checking button in the tool bar.
    3. The ability to auto-generate technorati tags
    4. For blogger, the ability to add in a link.
    5. A FireFox Tool bar.

    Yeah, I realise we're not likely to see the latter - but if MS is really interested in cross platform use of this tool, a tool bar for FireFox would be useful (as I tend not to use IE unless I have to).

    The main reason I prefer FireFox is due to the add-in features. I have several cool add-ins, not least of which is AdBlock that speeds up browing on a number of sites.

  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 27, 2006
    I really can't beleive the buzz over this new tool by the Windows Live team. I was browsing over the

  • Anonymous
    August 27, 2006
    I really can't beleive the buzz over this new tool by the Windows Live team. I was browsing over

  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2006
    PingBack from http://deepakkapoor.net/blog/2006/08/31/posting-from-windows-live-writer/

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2006
    I really can't beleive the buzz over this new tool by the Windows Live team.  I was browsing over...

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2006
    I really can't beleive the buzz over this new tool by the Windows Live team.  I was browsing over...

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2006
    Looking at the IE Blog a while ago I noticed their article about a new beta program called...

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2006
    It's 2:48am and I'm futzing around with Team Foundation Server build. I came across a permission issue...

  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2006
    I really can't beleive the buzz over this new tool by the Windows Live team. I was browsing over...

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
    I really can't believe the buzz over this new tool by the Windows Live team. I was browsing over the

  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2008
    PingBack from http://softwareinformation.247blogging.info/ieblog-windows-live-writer/

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
    PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=ieblog-windows-live-writer