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I decided to point my domain name at something.

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I’ve recently had to look more in to the whole blogging world, especially in the area of WYSIWYG editors. For OASES Cal Alumni Club, I’ve set up a WordPress blog as our website in the hopes that it’s simple and straightforward enough for other people to maintain and add content themselves. In the past, we’ve tried more custom sites, and it usually ends up just being Shawn or me posting all the content, or having to be involved in some way for each change. With this in mind, I did a brief search (ok, I just read a recommendation on Lifehacker) and decided to check out Windows Live Writer. Using the Windows XP VM I keep around on Fusion to run Windows-only stuff, I installed WLW. I can honestly say that I’m pretty impressed. There are a lot of basic things that I always assumed would be simple, but found hard with the web based WordPress posting interface. Inserting images (resizing, cropping, uploading, etc) is just too much work and manual clicking and entering sizes. With WLW, the process is as simple as I thought they should be. Just drag and drop. Got a bunch of pictures? Just click ‘insert photo album’ and drag the group of pictures in the window. WLW automatically uploads the photos to whatever Windows Live photo album service is, creates an album, and throws together little thumbnails that represent the album in a stylish way. See? I don’t even have to know what the service it uses to host the album. Windows Live Writer works with tons of different blogging services, so chances are it works with what you’re using. Try it out now. As far as I can tell though, it doesn’t work with Tumblr, which is what slinlee.com is hosted on, but if I keep writing actual posts, instead of the usual one liners and links to video that Tumblr’s interface is great for, I might be tempted to switch blogging platforms… just for WLW. Btw, the title is linked to an example of a post I made with WLW that includes the automatically generated photo album.

I’ve recently had to look more in to the whole blogging world, especially in the area of WYSIWYG editors.

For OASES Cal Alumni Club, I’ve set up a WordPress blog as our website in the hopes that it’s simple and straightforward enough for other people to maintain and add content themselves. In the past, we’ve tried more custom sites, and it usually ends up just being Shawn or me posting all the content, or having to be involved in some way for each change.

With this in mind, I did a brief search (ok, I just read a recommendation on Lifehacker) and decided to check out Windows Live Writer. Using the Windows XP VM I keep around on Fusion to run Windows-only stuff, I installed WLW. I can honestly say that I’m pretty impressed.

There are a lot of basic things that I always assumed would be simple, but found hard with the web based WordPress posting interface. Inserting images (resizing, cropping, uploading, etc) is just too much work and manual clicking and entering sizes. With WLW, the process is as simple as I thought they should be. Just drag and drop.

Got a bunch of pictures? Just click ‘insert photo album’ and drag the group of pictures in the window. WLW automatically uploads the photos to whatever Windows Live photo album service is, creates an album, and throws together little thumbnails that represent the album in a stylish way. See? I don’t even have to know what the service it uses to host the album.

Windows Live Writer works with tons of different blogging services, so chances are it works with what you’re using. Try it out now. As far as I can tell though, it doesn’t work with Tumblr, which is what slinlee.com is hosted on, but if I keep writing actual posts, instead of the usual one liners and links to video that Tumblr’s interface is great for, I might be tempted to switch blogging platforms… just for WLW.

Btw, the title is linked to an example of a post I made with WLW that includes the automatically generated photo album.