Blog editors revisited

Temporary message notice

If you do your blog reading in an RSS reader (and who doesn’t, these days?) and if you happen to include my blog among those thus favoured, you may have seen a rather strange little notice on my blog referring to a temporary post which, had you looked for it, you would not have found.

This was because I decided, despite all I had said about blog editors (the software kind, not the human kind), to try out another one. I have read so many panegyrics about this piece of software that I thought I really should try it. The application to which I refer is Windows Live Writer. Microsoft in their wisdom (or unwisdom – take your pick) have decided to create something called “Windows Live”. My impression, after an admittedly cursory look at the thing, is that this is an attempt to create yet another networking site, complete with blog, photo gallery, IM, etc. etc.

While I am just not interested in that sort of thing, somewhere in the morass is a piece of software that everyone says is wonderful. So I thought I really ought to try it.

I have two requirements that any blog editing software must meet. All those I have tried have fallen down on one or both of these. The first, for reasons that I have explained before (here, for example), arises from the fact that I usually upload two versions of any photo included in a post, one, the thumbnail in the post, and the other, a larger version you can view by clicking on the thumbnail. The software therefore has to allow you not merely to insert an image but also to make it a link to another. That is simple enough to do in HTML but if you expected all blog editors to be able to do it you would be disappointed.

Secondly, I like to put captions under my photos. It seems only polite, somehow, to tell readers what the picture is about. This is, to my mind, such an obvious requirement that I would expect all blog editors to provide the means. Unfortunately, I do not know a single one that does.

Having installed Windows Live Writer (WLW, hereafter), your first task is to tell it about your blog or blogs. It then goes off and downloads information about each one, including the CSS code for its formatting. With this in hand, it can display your draft exactly as it would appear if you uploaded it to the blog. All this works pretty well and as far as I can see, the draft in WLW’s editor does look exactly as it will when published. If everything else worked as well, this would be a superb application.

Unfortunately, it failed on both my requirements. In the case of linking images, it does go part of the way. When you insert an image you can click on a tab which allows you to enter a link address. When the article is published, clicking on the image executes the link. The problem comes in setting up the image you wish to link to. While WLW will upload the inserted image for you, it cannot upload the image you are linking to. You have to do this yourself, putting it in your blog’s image store or on Flickr or Picasa or whatever your favourite image depository is.

If I am uploading one image and copying its link address, then I might as well do this for both images. The process isn’t much longer so very little is saved and extra complication added.

So what about captions? Forget it: you can’t do captions and that’s that. In my experiments I was reduced to inserting captions by editing my thumbnails so that the caption was part of the image. You can do this in FastStone, for example, though it is a little fiddly.

So what about that temporary message notice? Well, in order to know exactly how to display your draft, WLW apparently has to post to the blog. It asks you politely beforehand and there didn’t seem any good reason to refuse: there’s no point in spoiling the ship for a ha’p'orth of tar, is there? It is unlikely that anyone who reads blogs “the old-fashioned way” would even have seen the temporary post but RSS readers may have picked it up.

My verdict on WLW, then, is that if you are less fussy than I am, you may find it suits your purposes completely and perfectly. If so, good luck to you, use it and enjoy it. It does seem to perform well and, unlike some editors, copes with Blogger blogs as well as WordPress and others.

It does have one annoying feature, or bug. If you move the cursor up from one line to the next, it jumps to the beginning of the file, so you have to scroll all the way down again to where you want it to be. The longer your draft, the more annoying this becomes.

Tags: Windows Live Writer