Windows Live Writer Wrocks

I usually use Daniel Jalkut's MarsEdit on the Mac to edit my posts here. It's a sweet little program that works with Blogger, Wordpress, Movable Type, and most other blogging platforms. It allows offline editing, and greatly simplifies posting images from Flickr and so forth. I used Ecto for this for years - it's still around and works on Windows and Mac - but MarsEdit 2 is my tool of choice on the Mac. A number of friends have been raving to me about the free Windows Live Writer (WLW), though, so I decided to try it this evening. Wow!

For all the things Microsoft has done wrong (cough Vista cough), Windows Live Writer really is done right. It's designed for Microsoft's own blogging platforms, of course, but it also supports Wordpress, Blogger, and the usual suspects.

Sample Map

WLW gives you a live preview based on the actual blog style sheets - impressive - supports embedding of pictures, video, maps, and more, and best of all supports plug-ins so other blogger/programmers can extend it (with Flickr support, for example).

The picture embedding interface is an example of how rich this program is. It doesn't just upload an image and insert the relevant HTML, it has built-in picture editing tools, too. You can add a drop shadow or photo frame, resize, rotate, and adjust contrast. Or add special effects like sepia toning, watermarks, and more. All without leaving WLW.

There are some negatives. WLW embeds a lot of HTML into posts, which means they're harder to read if you edit them with Wordpress's own editor. And some of the layout defaults aren't great (notice the left justified "Sample Map" above). But considering this is only beta 3 there aren't many rough edges.

I've always been really impressed by the Windows Live tools - these guys may be doing the best programming at Microsoft. At least there's some consolation for those of you stuck working in Windows, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Daniel doesn't add some of these features to Mars Edit, too, which will make Mac folks a little less envious.

Three More Days To Book Your Hotel For Blog World

Blog World is coming up in Las Vegas November 8-9. I'm told I'm giving a talk on "The Cult of the Blog" Friday at 10:15a and many fellow TWiTs including Alex Lindsay and Scott Bourne will also be presenting. If you were planning on attending, hurry up and book your hotel. The Blog World hotel discounts expire Friday. See you there!

A Little Help Here

I love the "This Day In Leoville History" plug-in. On a blog like this with nearly seven years worth of posts it's fun to go back in time. But you've probably noticed that a number of the entries are 404: file not found. They're there, it's just that they have punctuation in the title. For some reason Wordpress can see the entries, but the links don't work. For example, today you'll see "2001: I’ve been farked" - something about the apostrophe throws off the permalink. The actual page is there but I can't link to it. Anyone have any experience with this? Got a fix? Maybe some sort of MySQL script to encode the non-text entities? Or a change to the default encoding? I'd appreciate any help you could offer. It's kinda bugging me. UPDATE: Ben had the right idea. I was using "pretty" permalinks that had the post title in the link. I changed it to year/month/day/post_id and that fixed the problem. Thanks for all your solutions!!

LOL Colophon

For those who are interested I've published a colophon page for this site here, including a complete list of the plug-ins I am using.

Plugin Mania

I've tweaked the site in a few more ways. Adding a print link, post ratings, an online user page (all from Lester Chan), and a mobile version that's particularly tuned to the iPhone (but works fine on other cell phones, too). By the way, did you know you can listen to my podcasts right from this page? See that Radio Leo block to the right? Click one of the triangles. Cool, neh? That's Angsuman Chakraborty's Taragana's Del.icio.us mp3 Player Plugin. I did all this while watching the Niners win a squeaker on Monday Night Football while Henry "did his homework" next to me. My idea of a perfect evening.