February 10, 2016

Open Live Writer is now Live

When I started blogging some years ago I was disappointed at the limited tools available and looking at things now I see that Google’s Blogger UI hasn’t changed much over the past 4 years and the editor can best be described as basic and with limited functionality.

After some research I found that Microsoft’s free Windows Live Writer (WLW) was actually a very useful and well packaged app despite it being free MS add-on. I was able to quickly create posts, edit and align pics before posting a draft to my blog. With WLW the posts usually only required some minor line break adjustments before it was ready to publish. After moving to MAC OS WLW was one of the few apps that I used via Parallels because I've to find a better replacement tool for the Mac.

Whilst Windows Live Essentials hasn’t been updated since 2012 the apps are still available and work on Windows 8 (not sure about v10) however to my dismay Google has removed support for a legacy security protocol in December 2015 which means WLW can no longer upload posts to Blogger.

For some time Ive been reading about how a group have been petitioning Microsoft to allow the code to become open source. Personally I never thought that MS would allow this in a million years so it was with a combination of shock and delight that I recently found out that MS did release the code and a fantastic independent group of people have open sourced and forked WLW to create Open Live Writer.

So far so good with OLW and I’m looking forward to future updates and perhaps a MAC OS version.

Keep up the good work.

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