Nov 30, 2007 | blog
Well, after wondering for several weeks how to leverage the tagging feature of WordPress 2.3, I’ve finally started using it. It helped to learn that Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer was fully supported for tagging use in WordPress v2.3.1 release last month.
The trick for WLW, is to use the "keywords" field of the post entry properties (shown below). WordPress 2.3.1 will pick those keywords up as the tags for the post.
While this isn’t the exact integration I was thinking of, it certainly allows me to use the internal tagging features of WordPress and also let’s me set tags to Technorati (and others) as well.
So now you’ll find two kinds of tags on nearly all my posts. I’d love to know if this is worthwhile to anyone or if it’s overkill.
And speaking of tags, blogging pal Steven Hodson has a post on tags today as well – but from a different perspective. Worth a read.
Sep 9, 2007 | blog
Ok, I’ve been using WLW for over a year now and really enjoy the tool. However, there are a few nit-picking things that I have to be fixed in the darn thing along with some ideas that would benefit the product.
In the last two beta releases, they have improved the product substantially (download beta 3 here) with many visual and feature enhancements. My current favorite update was the ability to (finally!) schedule posting to my hosted WordPress blogs.
- Complete Blog Integration – I happen to be a WordPress (hosted on my domain – not wordpress.com) user and expect that all the features will work with it. Others use TypePad, Blogger, and others. Integrate the product work the same with all these blogging platforms as well as it does with Live Spaces.
- CSS Classes – I wish that the editor would parse the CSS from a selected blog and allow the user to use the CSS Classes to be applied to text/items in the post creation area. For example, I have a uniquely formatted class called “tags” for each of my blogs, and it formats my “Technorati Tags” with a right-justified arrangement with a border and background combo for each blog. Same type of class formatting for my abbreviations.
- Tag Info – Wish that the tags for the post itself (again the Technorati tags) could be fed to the blog as entries to the “tags” field in the database. This way, the tagging information can be appended to the post by the blogging software with my formatting, and without putting too much space and visual clutter into each post.
- Custom Tagging Tool – The ability to insert tags and have them pre-formatted with the proper URL each time is great. Here’s what would make it better. Allow me to completely write the HTML code for the tool – you’re close now, just get rid of any WLW specific HTML.
- True XHTML – This is one of the big ones. GET RID OF ANY CUSTOM “WINDOWS LIVE WRITER” HTML OR “WINDOWS LIVE” SPECIFIC HTML. The output of this editor MUST be pure XHTML to be truly cross platform usable. Luckily I’ve figured out how to work around this every time there is a new update to the editor, but others may not be able to do these workarounds. Simply, if a blog that the bloggers is publishing to is not Windows Live Spaces, then the custom HTML used by WLW should be disabled and the blog theme and CSS should be followed by WLW.
Well, that’s a handful of suggestions that need to be worked into the final release of Windows Live Writer. Didn’t plan on it being exactly five, but that’s how it works sometimes. Come on WLW team, let’s get this stuff right, you’re so close to matching my expectations, it’s not too hard to finish it properly.
Anyone else have some suggestions to the Windows Live Writer team?
UPDATE: Thanks to Kent Newsome’s Evening Reading post, I noticed another blogger mentioning WLW. Claus over at Grand Slam Dreams has written a quick review of WLW beta3. Also, for those of you looking for more information on the XHTML support in WLW beta3, check out Joe Cheng at whateverblog where he elaborates on WLW’s XHTML support
Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, WordPress, Rick Mahn
May 31, 2007 | blog
A new version of Windows Live Writer is available for download. Have just installed it, I’ll be reporting issues as I find them – my one wish that wasn’t included in this release is support for XHTML so WLW is just as messy with HTML as all Microsoft products. Yuck on that front, but I’m hoping that it’ll be included in future releases.
I’ll post more once I’ve worked with it, and yes this is my first post with WLW2.
Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer
Mar 3, 2007 | blog
It may be for me. My new theme simply does not like WLW created posts – mainly because it does not create strict XHTML. Why can’t Microsoft adhere to a standard? It really frosts my balls when they have some great (and complex) products, but they can’t follow something as simple as XHTML.
Ugh!
And it was a nice WYSIWYG editor as far as I was concerned. Figures!
Get it right MS!
Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer
Oct 6, 2006 | blog
This post is directed to the Windows Live Writer team! I really enjoy the WLW tool for blogging, in fact I’ve been using the latest build since it was released a week or so ago and have not blogged about it.
I could rave about all the features, but I’ll simply say that the tagging, category improvements, performance, PNG support and the WLW Gallery at Windows Live are great improvements to WLW. Keep up the good work!
Now my one negative comment. Pre-set post date info does not work with WordPress. If I want to set the date a post appears on my blog, sometime in the future, the blog mysteriously travels back in time to December 31st, 1969! Is there a chance that this could be fixed? I’ve seen the same behavior in Word 2007 B2.
Fixing this one feature would make this already fantastic tool, indispensable.
Link to: Writer Zone
