A couple of weeks ago I started trying out Windows Live Writer, a desktop based blog post creation tool developed by Microsoft. I’m happy to say that so far this new tool has worked very well for me.

Over the past couple of years I’ve tried out a number of tools for short periods with little success. The problems I’ve had ranged from bugs in the application to incompatibility with certain features found on my blogging service. Thankfully, I’ve found very few issues while utilizong Windows Live Writer along with my WordPress blog.

I’ve written about a half a dozen posts so far with the tool and have published them successfully everytime. Editing some of the posts has worked fine as well. I’ve even included images and special tags related to some of my WordPress plug-ins. Even with these additions my posts appeared on the blog as if I had written them in the native WordPress post writer.

So I have to tip my hat to Microsoft for developing this tool.

Here are some of the features that have been working well for me:

• Simple connectivity to my WordPress blog.
• WYSIWYG post authoring that mimics the style of my posts.
• Option to edit HTML on posts.
• Import and support for all post categories.
• Ability to save drafts locally.
• Ability to edit and re-publish local copies of posts.
• Ability to include images in posts.
• Support for custom WordPress plugin tags.

The only thing that’s missing that I use regularly is the ability to click a button to add a bit of code to split the post so that a “continue reading” link appears on the front page for longer post. This is supported by adding the more tag to the HTML version of the post.

Mileage may vary with other blog services, but this is a great local post management tool. And while Windows Live Writer is a good tool for managing posts, it may not fit your needs if you use your blog tool to publish audio or video for podcasts.

For example, some of the more useful WordPress plugins for audio and video include features that need to be managed in the post editor.

The tool is free so you certainly have nothing to lose by downloading today and giving it a test drive.

[tags]Social Media, Blogging, Windows Live Writer, Microsoft, Review, Software[/tags]