The correct response is… but why? Isn’t the Serendipity Control panel good enough for you? Huh? Huh?
And Windows Live Writer? Like, from Microsoft?
At this point, friends of mine would be well within their rights to pick up the phone and call the local mental institution. I hear they give rewards.
No, I haven’t gone loony. A while back, I installed the Windows 7 Beta (more about that in future posts), and decided that, in order to “do the beta right,” I really needed to use Microsoft software when there was a viable Microsoft solution. I therefore ended up with the Microsoft Live Suite.
Just about every other program in the suite is rubbish. Pretty, but rubbish. I don’t need a local photo organizer, the email software simply isn’t Gmail… etc, etc, etc. I found no use for any of the tools…
…except for Live Writer.
Using the MovableType API interface for blogging, Windows Live Writer detects my Serendipity blog, downloads the theme (even if it blows up humorously inside), and lets me just write.
It’s WYSIWYG (a word I learned from an old Windows 3.1 demo movie from 1991), so no juggling with markdown, or BBCODE, or HTML… nope, I just strike “control+I” and I have italics. Not that I have a problem with markup for documents; I make a living writing markup. It’s just nice to have a WYSIWYG tool that’s just there, waiting to help me do basic markup.
But here’s my favorite feature:
OMG! Just add a picture in the program, and Windows Live Writer resizes it, converts it, ads a bit of pizzaz to it, and I’m done! No round trips through Serendipity’s Media Browser, no separate upload phases… I just say “Put me a picture there my good man,” and it puts me a picture there! (On the other hand, you can see it breaking all over my blog’s theme… something to work on.)
So, yeah. I see myself using this program alot. It’s more responsive than multiple PHP powered forms over the internet, doesn’t suffer from lag, I can save both local and server drafts, I have a spellchecker installed, can insert media with no sweat at all… it just streamlines it so well.
(Note: I discovered whilst writing this entry that the word “Microsoft” is in the spell checker. Huh. How about that?)
