It’s now 1:00am.  I worked for 1.5 hours on the previous post, hit publish…and the only thing that got saved was…the title of the post.  All that work gone.

But I’m a stubborn SOB. I spent some time searching for some offline blogging tools, only to discover that I already had Windows Live Writer 2011 installed on my netbook. And it’s great. Not perfect, but at least I now can write and save drafts locally, and I won’t lose an entire post to the vagaries of the online editor in WordPress. And it’s free!

It supports the blog theme, categories, tags, media uploads, and just about everything I use on a regular basis. It’s way better than the clunky blog publishing feature in Microsoft Word, and it doesn’t have all that extra word processing/desktop publishing stuff that Word has.  It just has tools specifically relevant to writing and editing blog posts, plus comment moderating and administrative tools. And in addition to the WYSIWYG editor, it has an HTML editor and a preview screen built in.  Apparently, there are also a number of plug-ins available for it that I’m now keen to investigate.

I’m not usually a big rah-rah guy for Microsoft software, but this Writer application really works.

I re-wrote the previous post in Writer, saved a local copy of it, then hit Publish, and it all worked as smooth as a baby’s behind. I heartily recommend Writer. it’s a pretty neat little application.

Now, I can go to bed.

And, yes, I wrote this post in Writer, too.

~
Dale Franks
Google+ Profile
Twitter Feed