An offline blog editing tool is a great idea.
Anyone who composes blog posts online, within the blogging tool, whether WordPress, or BlogHarbor, or Typepad, or some other tool, probably has a tale to tell of at least one post that disappeared without a trace when an Internet connection went down.
My challenge has been to find an offline editing tool that works well, consistently, for me. For various reasons, so far I haven’t found one that I like unreservedly. Qumana came close and in fact a couple of colleagues to whom I recommended it think it’s the bee’s knees, the cat’s whiskers, trumps, a cool tool, the nonpareil. As I did, except that for some unknown reason it won’t open on my computer.
I’d had a similar challenge with Windows Live Writer. People told me how great it was. I even saw it demonstrated by the aussie microsoft blogger, Frank Arrigo.
Product looked good. Only problem was, it wouldn’t open on my machine.
But today when I saw on Frank’s blog the news of a new update to Live Writer I thought, can’t hurt to try it.
Installation was smooth. Writing this post and managing the linking process went smoothly.
A couple of things aren’t clear yet. After typing the previous line and inserting some tags, I did a Save Draft (on the server, with WordPress, it would be Save and Continue Editing). I chose a web view and got a preview as it would look in the browser. Only trouble was that I could not see how to get back into Edit mode, without choosing - as I eventually did - the option to continue editing on the server. Which is what I’m doing now.
I also missed choosing the categories for the post. The area for doing that is at the bottom of the editing screen, whereas I am used to seeing the categories on the right of the editing panel online.
And it’s not clear how best to incorporate trackbacks. The help screen indicates this is an advanced feature, only available for blog service providers which have it. WordPress should qualify. Maybe there is a button I just can’t see. For the moment I will use the Trackback field in the WordPress online editor.
These are minor details and I expect my proficiency in using the tool will grow quite rapidly. I won’t even think about possible glitches!
Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer, Frank Arrigo, Qumana, blog editors, blog editing tools
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You can switch between Web Preview and Web Layout (which is what we call the normal WYSIWYG editing view) by using the View menu or View toolbar button, or by hitting the F11 shortcut key.
For trackbacks, slugs, and other properties, look for the chevron to the right of the categories control and publish date. If you click that, the tray at the bottom will slide up and show additional options including trackbacks.
It’s always a tough dilemma figuring out how to make controls easy to discover without cluttering up the screen. We got consistent complaints in the previous version that the categories control was hard to find, we thought this would be an improvement but it sounds like our work may not be done yet.
Thanks for the feedback!
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