Okay, I’m trying Open Live Writer to write my blog with. I’m still doing the rest of my writing (including Twitter and Facebook) in Scrivener.
Why?
It’s because I’m trying to save a step or three in my blogging process. Scrivener’s good, but it doesn’t use HTML formatting. Open Live Writer, Thingamablog, Blog Jet and Blog Desk all are geared for writing blogs.
In the last month, I’ve tried about every blogging program, and I liked Thingamablog about the best, but it doesn’t have a word count feature, it isn’t set up to automatically post to WordPress, and indeed, it’s not really set up to work with WordPress at all! If the author of it would make his appearance again and fix that, I’d promote that program like mad! But it’s been 8 years, and no sign of him, so that project is abandoned.
Blog Desk was good, but it didn’t exactly sync up with my blog the way it was supposed to. It too has been abandoned for the same amount of time.
Blog Jet is not free. It too has been abandoned, and the last update to it was two years ago. Listen, if you’re going to abandon your program, stop charging for it. If you’re going to charge for it, keep working on it. If you feel you want to move on, then go on your website, put a note up there saying, “We’re closing down the shop. Here’s a user ID and serial number you can use to register the program.”
Or just take the registration part out of it. It’s kind of like charging for Sidekick or some other great old program from the 90’s.
I liked blogging in Scrivener, but all the formatting I did in it was lost the minute I copied it to WordPress, and that made for extra work, not less. It almost took me as long to edit and format it as it did to write it in the first place!
So, I went and found Livewriter. It won’t install on Windows 8.1, so I found the Open Source project for it. Open Live Writer is still the same as it used to be, but actually it has a lot more features now. The bugginess of it is now gone. Yes, it still has the feel of the Microsoft Live stuff, and looks very Windows Vista, which to me is still the best Windows Operating system.
The good news is, Livewriter now is a BREEZE to interface with your blog. I’m self hosted on Blue Host, and believe it or not, all I had to do was tell it my URL, then wait until prompted for username and password. It then retrieved all of my categories and tags.
So yeah, it works much better than the old Livewriter did. If you’re looking for a great blogging tool, give Livewriter a try.
It seems to be the only PC program for desktop blogging that is still in development!
