When you’re in the business of issuing a blog post one of the nicest things you can have is a tool that will facilitate and make possible the task of entering your information easily, and eloquently, being able to format the information without having to go to a lot of gyrations to present it to the public.

While I don’t like admitting it, Microsoft has produced a very nice blog posting program called Windows Live Writer. It’s a free blogging tool provided by Microsoft and again one of the most surprising things that offered by the program is its extensibility, offering extensions to increase the functionality of the program.

Windows Live Writer can be downloaded from this location, but in typical Microsoft form they make you download an installer.

Once you get the installer downloaded; once you’ve executed the program prompt you to install a bunch of other Microsoft products, which is what I find unattractive about the process, my opinion is that you should be able to simply download the program by itself, without being prompted to download a bunch of other accessory applications that you don’t want.

Once you got the application loaded, the execution of the program is actually very simple. It works on the basis of a standard word processor type interface/GUI.

One of the standout features of Windows live writer is its ability to use your active theme from your blog.

Once you’ve created your blog account, Windows live writer will go out to that account examine your blog and the theme is currently being used, download that to your local machine so that when you’re composing your post you’ll see exactly what you’re going to see once the Post has been set as ‘active’.

A lot of times when you’re composing your information in other applications or with Word press itself you can’t see the true results of your work until the article has been posted/live.

Going to the ‘file’ menu you’ll find that you’ve got a plethora of choices in regards to how you’re going to present your information to your readers.

While you’re able to insert images and videos fairly easy to the program, itself makes cutting and pasting images and graphics directly into your posts extremely easy; it follows the traditional way of cutting and pasting information; there’s no special understanding that you have to have order for it work properly.

Going back to the plug-ins, there are available for windows live writer you can add special functionality to the program so that you can import videos, emoticons, horizontal lines or special picture effects.

The program functions on the basis of as close as you can get to Windows WordPad.

If you write blogs or write blogs on a regular basis and you need a will to produce stuff that looks professional and is readable to your audience, I would recommend using Windows live writer. It’s a free program and at this time no restrictions on use.

If you’re a type of individual who likes to do things on the go or they would like to have a portable version of Windows live writer; it’s available here.

Thanks for reading!

Enjoy.

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