For years, I’m been a big fan of WordPress.  How could you not be? WordPress is amazing versatile open source software; 25 million people rely on it to publish their blogs.   If there is one thing that could be a bit easier, though, it is the WordPress post editor.   It works well enough, but it’s a bit clunky and the window can be confining. 

Rather than composing on the WordPress editor, then, I often write my posts on MSWord, or I dictate them in Dragon, then paste them into the WordPress post editor.  One needs to be careful, though, to first strip out all of the word processing formatting tags.  If you don’t, those tags can wreak havoc with the site design—they crawl outside of the post and change the formatting of other posts too, and they can even modify the homepage design.   To strip out those formatting tags, I copy the finished text from my original workspace and paste it into Notepad (on Windows) and immediately copy it out and paste it into the WordPress post editor.   But that requires two extras steps.  And then I find myself tweaking the post once it has gone live.

Where, then, can one get the best of both worlds:  A) a spacious writing area with WYSIWYG and B) no worries about formatting tags?   This post is my first attempt to use Windows Live Writer, a free utility from Microsoft.  I learned about it from the company that provided my magazine theme, Solostream.  The screen looks very much like a well-equipped word processor.  When you are finished with your post, you choose your blog (you can set up many blogs at once) from a pick list, and you are finished.  You can easily format photos and videos too.  

It all seems quite painless.  This is an excellent product by Microsoft, which allows me to appreciate WordPress all the more.   Now I’m going to hit “publish” and we’ll see how it looks.