Desktop app for blogging–Windows Live Writer

I’ve been looking for a desktop application for blogging on WordPress and ran into Windows Live Writer. It’s a free tool for writing blogs offline and lets you publish whenever you are ready.

The benefits that I see of using a desktop app over writing directly on the blog using a browser are

• You can save the blog locally and hence write over a span of several days or weeks
• You can be working on several different blogs at the same time, again because they are all saved to the disk
• A desktop app provides rich editing options like spellchecking (most browsers do that too) and auto fixing of some words. For example, if you type “dont”, it puts a single quote before the “t” automatically.
• You can have multiple blog accounts and hence publish to them
• There are hundreds of plug-ins available for like formatting code snippets or adding a Digg button to the blog
• The controls for adding images and links look better than that on a browser and they respond faster too
• The editing controls look just like your regular desktop controls that you are used to and can also use predefined HTML styles for Headings among other editing options
• It lets you preview the blog instantly and also loads the site theme so it looks exactly how it will look when you publish
• You can also set a date to post the blog. I never used this feature, but, its there if you want to
• There are many other features like Word count (if you care at all)
• Post tags can also be added while writing the blog (just above the blog text area)
• (Update) You can select the “categories” that you have setup on your site right while writing your blog offline. Further more, you can even add new categories

For the minuses, I can’t seem to find any. If I do, I will update the post.