November 14th, 2008
by
admin
There is a new WindowsLiveWriter Update available. I had a chance to test drive the technical preview of this last month and it has been fantastic!
Just a reminder this program runs on your desktop and enables you to update WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal and many more blogging platforms from one location, managing multiple blogs.
One of the weird new features is the picture tilt option, and for some reason the reflective image option (creates that web2.0 looking reflection below an image is now missing) but all in all the new version is pretty damn good. 
Image and video publishing enhancements
- Insert videos from Soapbox and YouTube
- Upload videos to Soapbox and YouTube
- Image cropping and tilting
- Additional border styles for images (such as reflection and rounded corners)
- Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
- Support for centering images
Blog authoring enhancements
- Spell Checking in more languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian-Cyrillic, Serbian-Latin, Spanish, and Swedish
- Auto Linking
- Smart quotes/typographic characters
- Word count
Experience improvements
New toolbar makes more commands – like Font formatting - readily available
Tabs for view switching
Improved category control with search and type-down filtering
New look and feel
Writer Zone: Releases
They have made a number of wholesale changes to the look and feel of the program, especially when you switch between views which are now labeled as lower tabs of ‘edit’, ‘Preview’, and ‘Source’.
No complaints here other than it is still a little tricky to find the latest version on their site which also gets plagued with comment spam and I’d really like to see that reflective image thing come back along with rounded corners!
April 12th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
This Weekend I am going to be trying out the text template plug-in for Windows letter writer.
For some time now I’ve been considering how am I use templates with Windows live writer to speed up my production and increasing consistency of the articles I write with Windows live writer.
I have also been toying with the notion of including Buzzboost Java script inserts from feedburner so I can cross promote different articles on different blogs that are tangential relevant to the blogs I’m writing on.
Some of this can be done with updates to a blog templates or theme, such as including a signature or sign off or something at the end of each and every blog article. But there are occasions when you want to use something slightly less standard but still rather regular within an article.
For example I have several articles I write, where I discuss a specific product that I’m reviewing or a product that I write tutorials for a regular basis. These articles often times generate the same types of questions and follow responses every time I write a new article. With a template I could include something like a short list of FAQs, with active links to help people get the answers to those quick questions and then help keep the discussion directly on target and relevant while simultaneously increasing traffic to those other areas where I want to direct readers.
Monetization Tip with Windows Live Writer
Alternatively from a monetization perspective, I could use templates to display ads that I want to regularly push through onto a blog. For example if I write, ghostwrite or run several blogs, and I have four or five advertisements or banners that I want to promote on those blogs, I could establish a template for those particular ad placements and place them directly into the article I’m writing through Windows live writer by pushing a button with a template. This’ll save me the time of having to go out and grab that code each and every time from say and affiliates program, and it’s a lower tech way of doing something that ad rotators do. Ad rotators can be very effective, but sometimes on some sites or for some programs they can be overkill or a lot of extra manual work.
For example if I had a banner placement for St. Thomas villa rentals that I wanted to cross promote across a travel blog, a diving blog and maybe an adventure travel blog, I could establish the ad code in the template and maybe every 3rd or 4th article, I could add this ad code to new articles.
If you are interested in this Windows live writer you can find it here:
Text Template Plugin For Windows Live Writer - Release: V1.2.4 Production
