Windows Live Writer (beta)—Most likely the best local blog editor going. Or at least it will be in the final version whenever that may be. After months of using this exercise in frustration with all it’s excellent features and all it’s bugs and quirks I’m well past the point where I have to grit my teeth or at least sigh very heavily every time I open it up. It just does some things so well and a few other things so horribly. Now, I’m not going to do yet another review on all the wonderful features and bugs of this fine first offering by the Windows Live Team. There’s plenty of reviews out there already. This post is about what I absolutely have come to hate about this otherwise great blog editor.

So here’s a few things that keep me from using WLW full time. My love/hate list in no particular order:

(And all due respects to the WLW developers. I understand how it is however, frustration being what it is…)

I love how WLW works images:

All the basic functions built into the editor work very well from basic image placement within a post to adding a watermark to an image. Shadows, borders, embedded links and basic editing features such as sharpening, blurring, Sepia etc all work as you would expect and this Should make “time to publish” fairly short depending on the length of the post of course and it does with one glaring exception. See below in…

I hate how WLW works images:

One of the biggest complaints about the image feature of Windows Live Writer is that when you add a border to an image, it decreases the size of the image so that the border and image combined have the same dimensions as the original image. For instance let’s say you want to insert an 100 X 80 image into a post and add the “Photo” border around it. The problem comes about when you add the border. Once added, the dimensions of the image have now been decreased by the width of the border surrounding it making your once sharp, clear image pixilated and basically non-viewable and that isn’t something you want on your blog. The same goes for the drop shadow only the degradation in image quality is not as bad simply because the drop shadow effect is not as wide as the “Photo” type border and only surrounds two sides vs four.

The workaround of course, is to set the “Border” effect in WLW to “Inherit from weblog” and add your own effects to your image using your favorite imaging program before you insert it into your post. However, this type of sidetrack just adds that much more time before you can publish.

Hopefully this will be fixed in the ever promised new release.

I love how WLW handles publishing:

Couldn’t be simpler. Almost a one-button publishing function. In fact, unless you’re posting as a draft, that’s exactly what it is and publishing as a draft is just about as simple. Just use the down arrow next to the publish button in the toolbar and select it. Simple enough. The other thing I love is that the WLW’s publishing feature automatically knows whether the post is a new post or just an edit. No having to choose between between either a “publish as post” or “publish as edit” type of thing so none of those “Oh crap I published it twice!!!” mistakes occur. Works pretty slick. Well almost, as you can see below.

I hate how WLW handles publishing:

Images! Windows Live Writer murders images when publishing. Not the quality mind you. Not as long as you don’t add a border or drop shadow as I said above. No—I’m talking about two things here.

First, let’s say I insert an image into a post with the ingenious name of…image.jpg. Now, once I publish, I expect the name of the published image to remain…image.jpg. Logical yes? But noooo. To wit:

I insert…

“image.jpg”

…into a post called…

“Yet another post.”

Then I publish and what do I get for my image name?

“windowslivewriteryetanotherpost-10757image.jpg”

Ohyougaottabekidding! I have read that the original intent was to keep the uploaded images off the blogger’s root directory of their install and the above cobbled together name was actually a path to other sub-directories it created which was just as bad…such as:

“windowslivewriter/yetanotherpost/10757/image.jpg”

How or when the path changed to renaming the image I simply don’t recall and I no longer care. Could have been the last update to WLW (build 6) or could have been Wordpress 2.1 that did it…don’t know. I just hope it’s fixed in the new upcoming release.

Second, I can’t edit any post if the post in question has images. Why? Because with every edit I make and publish thereof, WLW uploads a whole new set of images for that post and slaps an additional number onto the end of the already garbled name for good measure. Edit a post with three images, three times and you end up with nine images total uploaded for that same post. Doesn’t bode well if your host limits your storage space now does it?

All these rants of mine have already been well documented by myself and others at the Live Writer Forum and are supposed to be fixed in the next release and this leads me to the final rant….

WHEN? I realize that this, almost seven months old release is a beta and for the amount of features there are bound to be a few bugs and…that the next release is going to be a major one but seems to me that it should have have been released like yesterday already!

Alright—got that out of my system but I have been faithfully following the forum since November, 2006 and all I ever get lately is that the new version will be released soon but they can’t say when. And I know what requests for new features aren’t going to be addressed in this release. Heck, I even know what it looks like so in my mind it’s time to stop dangling the word soon in front of us hard-working bloggers and deliver the goods! Over a half a year is too long in my opinion.

Besides…I have a major undertaking I need to get started on soon and I want to use Windows Live Writer to do it and I want to use it without having to spend an extra 10 minutes each time I want to add a photo. Selfish? You bet!

There are other small bugs in the Writer but they aren’t going to limit anyone’s use unlike the ones I’ve already mentioned ever so delicately but that’s too be expected from a first effort. I just hope that the new release will be out before much longer. Like before it officially becomes summer?

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, blog editor, WLW

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