Want to simplify your blogging experience? If you are a PC user, you might want to try using the free desktop application, Live Writer. (Download Live Writer here.)
I love to blog. I love putting photos in my blog posts. But uploading images one by one into my online application is tedious. Logging in and out of my online blog is sometimes inconvenient. This meant creating blog posts took longer that I liked.
When I stumbled upon Live Writer, I decided to give it a whirl. I love it! I love it more each day.
Here are important things to know and remember about Live Writer.
- Live Writer works with Windows Live, Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and many more blogging applications.
- You can set up multiple blogs in your Live Writer application. This allows you to easily post to any blog you have from a single spot.
- After you set up a blog in Live Writer, your templates and settings download into the application (category lists, etc.). This allows you to preview your post from the application.
- Live Writer stores the posts you have written in the application. If you have it installed on multiple computers (as I have), you can only edit the posts you wrote on that computer in the Live Writer app. Of course, all of your posts are stored in your online blogging application and you can edit them from there, as usual.
- Live Writer allows you to schedule posts in advance. As a note: I have not been able to get this particular feature to work with my TypePad blog. If I wish to schedule a post in advance, I choose the “Post draft and edit Online” option. Once Live Writer posts the draft, it opens the TypePad post interface and I can schedule it from there..
- If you wish to publish the post you are working on, Live Writer does it all for you with a single click.
- You can work on as many posts as you wish in Live Writer and publish them when you are ready.
- Free plug-ins are available for Live Writer. For instance, I use the Twitter plug-in so that my blog posts are automatically sent to Twitter when they go live.
- You can tell Live Writer to remind you to spell-check posts before publishing. I also have Live Writer remind me to insert tags and the category before publishing.
- Inserting photos is simple as dragging and dropping or using copy/paste shortcuts.
- Live Writer has multiple options for displaying images such as adding drop shadows, borders.
- You can add maps, photo albums, emoticons, files, event reminders, tables, and more with a single click.
Here are the system requirements for Live Writer. It doesn’t take much. I am writing this particular post on my little 10 inch MSi Netbook right now! (By the way, I love my Netbook. It is the best travel companion I’ve ever had…besides family members.)
It took me 10-15 seconds to add this map to my post.
