Payton’s Random Rants

It’s amazing. Absolutely amazing. Microsoft releases a really nice tool that is still in BETA, and people decide that after five minutes that it’s uninstall city. OK, fine, but the first comment from Ryan is really uncalled for. What in the world does Windows Live Writer have to do with a monopoly? Microsoft is probably the smallest fish in the blog software pond!

Link to Thrashing Stinks / Microsoft Live Writer Beta: WYS is not WYG

But that’s not the only review out there. As a matter of fact, there’s a bunch of reviews of Windows Live Writer. A really good one is from Paul Stamatiou and can be read here.

I’m still reserving final judgement myself, but so far I really like Windows Live Writer. I’ve been searching for a good blog authoring tool. So far I’ve gone through the Performancing plugin for Firefox, Zoundry Blog Writer, and some others that were so bad that I have a mental block against them. The majority of the posts I’ve written for my ITtoolbox blog have been hand crafted in Visual Studio or the Movable Type interface, or written in Word and then copied and pasted to Movable Type. ITtoolbox currently has XML-RPC disabled so I can’t test this out there yet, but I’m looking forward to it when they do make it available.

One thing I’m going to try out with Windows Live Writer is the SDK which should allow the creating of plug-ins. I have a side project where I was making my own blog poster for ITtoolbox, but I’ve really backed off that project as it really appears to be superfluous. The advantage of the route I was going is that it didn’t depend on XML-RPC, but instead was posting directly to the CGI as a form. Of course, going the XML-RPC route is much better one ITtoolbox re-enables that feature.

There’s definitely a need for someone to put together a site that tries out all of this Blog Blingg and gives honest opinions on it, as well as providing some services that are currently available, but still half-baked. Keep an eye on this blog as you may see some announcements coming in this arena.