In the days before Windows Live Writer (WLW), my blog editor of choice was Zoundry’s Blog Writer. This local blog editor worked well enough but definitely had it’s share of bugs, enough so that when Live Writer came on the scene Blog Writer was gently shown the door. Months passed and occasionally I went back to Zoundry’s website just to see if they’d disappeared yet and much to my surprise (and just a bit of satisfaction I might add) they were still there. But things appeared to be stagnate with no further development in the works to be seen.
Then one day I dropped in and lo, there was Raven. It was still very much an egg at that time but there was a lot of noise surrounding it as far as the loyal followers were concerned of which I one although my loyalty was best described as latent to be sure. But there was always the appreciation of the first local editor I ever used when I first began blogging.
There’s a lot in this editor to like for instance downloading and displaying all the tags from a WordPress based blog for example. And adding the ability to link highlighted text to various reference, search and blogging/bookmarking sites. For example the Windows Live Writer link above submits the linked text to Technorati as a search and the results page is the link itself. I also like how Raven breaks down a blog into it’s separate parts as in Posts, Links, Images and Tags, these being listed as “folders” in the left sidebar of the main window. Clicking on any one of these folders displays quite a lot of information about your posts, links, images and tags depending on which “folder” you click on. I was quite surprised to find that selecting a single post from the list displays that post in the bottom preview window using your selected template that you downloaded from your blog via the built in template manager. Nice touch that.
I won’t be leaving Windows Live Writer for this anytime soon since Raven still has those bugs and quirks you’d expect from any beta like automatically adding Technorati tags for any tags I type into the Tags field. For WordPress blogger’s that means that the Tag field automatically adds any new tags that you don’t currently have in your database (good) but automatically adds these tags as Technorati tags at the end of the post (bad). There are times when you don’t want to necessarily add Technorati tags to a post but by what I understand there’s a additional tagging option in the works that will allow the user to select any additional services in which to add tags to such as Technorati.
One thing that I still don’t see is an inline spell checker which is an absolute must for me. Otherwise how else will I be distracted from focusing on my writing? I guess I’ll just have to make do with the old style spell checker and just find another way to be distracted.
I’ll be posting more on this at a later date. 
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