Windows Live Writer Beta has been released on the Writers blog, although at this point you still can't find it at http://ideas.live.com

As an off and on blogger there are some great things, and some things still in the works.

Great Stuff.

* Discoverability of the Blog API is a great idea that I haven't seen before (although probably because I'm not paying for my blogging tools) Read RSD Specifications for more details.

This feature essentially means that most bloggers don't need to know the technical details of how to connect Windows Live Writer to their Blog Service of choice.

Spaces.Live.com gets configured straight away, which sounds like some internal API because as I recall the MSN Spaces API I'm using it doesn't support logging into the account using the standard user id/password. I hope they publish the specifications they are using so other blogging tools can also support this method.

* WYSIWYG - What you see is what you get, extended with the downloading of stylesheets so you really get something close to what your readers are going to see.

* Blog Properties - Tabbed Interface is a great space saver

* Publish Drop Down Button - although different from what I like, has great expandability as a few Blog Engines now support more than the original Publish | Draft options for Posting.

* Save Draft stores into some internal mechanism (although possibly a file somewhere on your system ) which lets you not worry about naming things since it generally presumes the title and you might be changing the title of your post several times before you post it.

* Blog Properties - Keywords | Tags. is given a lot of space so you can put in your really long set of tags without having it wrap off the line.

* Resizing Images in the GUI. This is something that is part of having WYSIWIG and I just love it.

A few small things I'm discovering.

* MDI versus single window application interface. I can understand on the first implementation how they would want to see if they can get things workign before they start going multi-document interface, but I do hope they go to MDI soon, Blog Management for anyone who has more than 10 posts can get real messy with this current single document interface.

* MoveableType API is not fully supported. Extra features of MT not included in Metaweblog API, such as Extended Text, Extract are not shown in the user interface.

* Blog Properties not shown by default. Easy to display through the View Menu but seems to be a feature that new users should be given immediate access to, since it is very very easy to remove from the interface and a feature that new users/bloggers will not know about.

* Blog Properties, date/time setting for Spaces.live.com account is enabled. As I understand, spaces.live.com will create a new post with the existing time on the servers and this option is not really configurable. This should be disabled for spaces blogs.

* Blog Properties: Draft, Publish, I publish drafts which are stored on my server differently from "published." The interface is different than what I'm used to (i.e. specify at the post button) but the advantage is (I think) that they can allow different types of posts (e.g. Post Pubhsh, Post Draft, Post Hidden) whenever the API allows it, without destroying the interface (like my bad app.)

* Image uploads seems to presume that if MoveableType is supported that the image upload facilities is fully supported. WLW does however give you an error message afterwards (i.e. on first publish with an image) that your server doesn't support the MT image/file upload api, and allows you at that point to configure an FTP upload.

* Recent Posts is a live connection thing where it connects everytime you want to check your recent posts.I don't like the way the interface is implemeted (i.e. different dialog box, only allows opening one Post at a time, and that post is opened in a new Window.)  The call to download all posts, everytime you want to look at a specific post seems fine on the fast Microsoft Bandwidth but is very inefficient for most other users.

* Images. There doesn't seem to be a way in the interface to set <br clear=al /l> after an image (without resorting to the HTML source) which resolves a lot of image/text wrapping issues on my blog.

Gotta jet and take the kids, but I'll visit this agian soon.

(note posting from my own disaster of a creation bTonga)

Visit bTonga