So I really wanted WLW to work. It's got a nice interface, some clever features (tables!), a plug-in community, etc. Just a few problems:

1. It regularly times out while posting, throwing an error and never showing a post as finished and posted (even if it is). It may not fully be WLW's fault -- Flickr does the same thing when posting to my blog -- but some applications don't, which means it takes some blame (and it's annoying).
2. The image uploader doesn't allow for any hand-crafted customization, only what MS has canned with it. In ecto, I can have the images wrapped with the drop shadow DIV stuff (and I can have drop shadows without actually modifying the image).
3. There's no native custom snippet/tag support. There are some plug-ins that will do custom snippets -- but not tags (i.e., select some text, click on the tag, have it wrapped with something in front and behind). That's a step backwards compared to what I have in ecto.
4. Category support seems wonky -- some things posted without (perhaps part of the time-out), others it wasn't clear how I could designate a primary category. (Yes, I know that "categories" are so 1990s, while tags -- esp. Technorati tags -- are what all the cool kids do. Bah.)

Windows Live Writer would be a very nice desktop client if I were just starting off with one. The complaints I have above are more a matter of advanced features I've come to count on, rather than something that everyone is likely to use. I'll be curious to see if MS does any significant improvements or push of WLW in the coming years.

Meantime, I'll be heading back to ecto, until I find something better.

Filed under :: Blogging - Technical
Link · Print · Edit · TR/G

Well, here's a test of the ongoing support for ecto: the new version seems to be posting new posts with a bad (approx 12 hours off) timestamp. Ugh. Let's see what happens when I point this out.

Well, here's a good sign -- went to the forum, placed the first troubleshooting request there ... and had a response within a couple of hours. A few hours later, a new version was up for me to test, and it solved the problem.

Promising.

And, for the record, the product is being renamed from "Ecto for Windows" to "Linear."