enter windows live writer

it's official! for the past few weeks i've been able to use a new tool just released, called windows live writer.  at it's core, writer is a blogging client (i'm sure there will be other uses for it in the future, but for now, this is what i use it for).  after seeing the announcement of the tool, i was skeptic.  YABC is what i thought (yet another blogging client, for those not familiar with the YA* acronyms).

but i bleed windows blue, so i installed it.  i should point out at this point that i amwas a blogjet user and gladly paid for it as it iswas a great tool for me having all the features i needed.  i loved it.  really.

my initial reaction to writer was 'sweet' -- until i started digging into features.  the writing experience was great and familiar, and the style preview in real time is great.  but i quickly noticed some lacking features.  i pinged the team and pointed them out.  after going back and forth, i was happy to see they started to trickle in to the daily teams.  it was great to see the agility of this writer team and willingness to take feedback.

i then noticed a few glaring missing things: integration with tagging, integration with flickr, etc. -- the things i loved about blogjet.  have no fear, writer has a plugin model and is extensible.  sweet.  after reviewing the sdk i came up with a flickr plugin that allows you to look at your flickr images (or others) and insert a reference to it.  yeah, it's simple, but that's what i loved about blogjet's simplicity as well.  the great thing is that the writer extensibility layer is .net -- nice! 

i wrote a quick and dirty tagging plugin as well that allows you to template some items.  i suspect this will be replaced by a much better one, but for now it does the job for me.  here's a screen shot of the tagging plugin:

and i also wrote a flickr image plugin that looks like this:

i would encourage you to download writer now and start using it -- take it for a spin...i think you'll like it -- and the extensible model.  give the team feedback.  let me know if you have any questions.  write plugins.  I hope to have my plugins available on codeplex as soon as the project gets approved.  please subscribe to this blog to know when that happens.

what are you waiting for?  download windows live writer