Those who read this blog may have noticed me experimenting with a variety of Blog Authoring tools, but over time I keep finding myself regressing back to the basic Wordpress post page. 

After reading favorable reviews of Windows Live Writer, I thought I’d give it a try and am impressed enough that it could become blog editor of choice. 

Before anything else, I should note that Windows Live Writer generates clean markup without a lot of html crud as some other blog editors do.    

One of the most compelling features for me is its image handling.   Writer will automatically upload local images when I publish my post.  Even better, it will create nice looking thumbnails thumbnails of whatever size I wish.  Combining this with Snag-it, it becomes trivial to include screenshots in blog posts.

Writer understands the styles of your blog and has an editing mode (”Web Layout”) that reflects those styles.  

It also lets you edit both local and server side drafts. 

Lastly, there’s a plugin model based on .Net that makes it relevatively simple to offer plugins for third-party image services like Flickr. 

A “gee whiz” feature is the ability to insert Windows Live Maps into your posts.  I’m not sure if this is useful or not, but it was fun to try.