All of the blogs on the Springstage network run on Wordpress.  And although Wordpress is a great platform for blogging, I’m not keen on using Wordpress in a browser for writing and editing  posts.  I find myself scrolling up and down too much and the navigation just becomes a pain.  I prefer to use a standalone app for that is designed for writing and editing posts. 

So for some time I’ve been trying out different apps for that purpose.  I found most of them had some sort of issue: too hard to use, confusing navigation, buggy, slow, etc.  I ended up using ScribeFire, which is an extension for Firefox; so its an app that launches from Firefox.  Its pretty good, but kind of slow to load.  And the navigation can be confusion, with buttons and menus located in different locations and sometimes confusing functions.  So much so that I accidentally deleted an older post, thinking that I was only deleting an old draft of the post.  When you delete something from a Wordpress based blog, gone means gone.  When you work in Wordpress you get ample warning, but in ScribeFire I found it to be an easy mistake.  I was able to get the post back with the help of Google (who else!) Reader.  Its a benefit of the fact that today, once something hits the internet, its available forever and for everyone. 

So I lost my enthusiasm for ScribeFire rather quickly and my search for an easy editor for blog posts continued.  This is when I stumbled into Microsoft Live Writer.  Now, I have to say I’m generally not a big fan of Microsoft products, (with few exceptions, Excel notably), so when I was looking for a decent blog publishing application, Microsoft was not the first place I looked.  And my expectations were rather low.  I expected it to be slow, weak on functionality and invasive (anyone remember IE?).

Instead, I find Live Writer to be the best choice short of working in a full HTML editor (but who needs that?).  Navigation is clear and intuitive.  Writing is done in WYSIWYG and feels fairly similar to MS Word.  Inserting hyperlinks is simple and intuitive.  What’s more, the linking process has some intelligence in it, in that it will recognize text that you hyperlinked previously and it will have the same URL ready.  Inserting pictures is easy and so is inserting videos supposedly (haven’t tried that yet).  It will remind you to set categories, add tags and do a spell check before you post.  It gives a good preview of your post and you can still edit the HTML, if you want or need to.  It can even handle multiple blogs.

So what’s not to like?  So far I haven’t found anything I don’t like about, so I’ll keep using it.  And I suggest you check it out if you want an easy way to write posts for your blogs.