Microsoft makes good stuff?

I’m writing this post using Windows Live Writer which is actually a pretty nifty piece of software to blog with.

It neatly detected my blog (given just the URL) and with my username and password, it happily downloaded the theme from the blog, so that I get a preview of what my post will look like as I create it. Even WordPress doesn’t do that yet although that will change in WordPress 3.0 (at least for the new default theme.) Your blog will need to support XML-RPC or Atom publishing to do this kind of cool stuff though.

What’s also cool is that the interface is blog-agnostic. I could be using it to post to a Blogger blog, a WordPress blog, LiveJournal or TypePad, not to mention Microsoft’s own Live Spaces and Sharepoint blogs.

What I’d really love though is for there to be an add-on for Firefox or an extension for Chrome, so that I could quickly open Windows Live Writer after selecting an excerpt or an image on a web-page or link. If I was using Internet Explorer, I could use the Live toolbar to hook into Live Writer, but no way I’m using that browser or another toolbar. I like my vertical space! 🙂

P.S. Almost 4 years ago, I had blogged about a Firefox add-on called Performancing which did just that. Sadly, the Performancing add-on seems to have died soon after and the site itself is now some sort of blog consultancy service.

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