Scott Hanselman has been trumpeting Windows Live Writer for some time now. I’ve been hesitant to try it out because I’m a control freak and I was convinced that Live Writer wouldn’t do things correctly. Well, he blogged about it again today so I’m giving it a try (with this post). It was the comments on his post that swayed me.
Live Writer has improved quite a bit since last time I tried it. It actually pulled down my WordPress theme in order to provide a themed preview, which isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough to get an idea. Adding categories and tags is really simple, with type-ahead suggestions from previous posts. It looks like it has some powerful picture, video and map embedding tools, which I will try eventually.
The thing I’m most curious about is embedding code snippets. It looks like all of the syntax highlighting plugins are 2+ years old. Update: I tried a couple of them and they both resulted in an awful looking table.