We all know Microsoft is evil. Never mind the tons of brilliant software they produce; the mere fact that they’re as close to a monopoly on office software as makes no difference, proves their fundamental badness. And in their lovely little song “Nothing left to lose” (from the magnificent “Turn of a friendly card” album), the Alan Parsons Project already proclaimed that “Nothing’s good that uses bad”. But now Microsoft has gone and confused this clear and uncomplicated view of things by creating Live Writer, darn them!
Live Writer is, in a word, brilliant. As a matter of fact, if you’re reading this entry because you came across it while maintaining your own LJ, I recommend you download it right now and start using it. Live Writer is to blogging what the Rolls was to getting from A to B. It’s a very slick-looking client-sided blog editor, but leaving it at that short description is like saying the iPhone is for talking to people. I could rave about Live Writer for the single feature of being able to maintain a reusable list of hyperlinks, with a user-friendly way of adding that annoying “target=’_blank’ ” parameter. No longer do I need to go through old entries to find that hyperlink I want to reuse in my new post; Live Writer offers them all in a neat little list.
But that’s not all. Not by a long shot. It offers a beautiful user-friendly method of adding maps (of anywhere in the world) to your blog (for instance, a close-up areal photograph of the building where I’m currently writing this entry). It accesses your existing blog, and gives you the possibility to edit old entries, whether they were created in Live Writer or not (or delete that embarassing entry you wrote two years ago). It offers WYSIWYG editing, and a visual way of adding special formatting, like tables, or quoted, or an lj-cut.
Yes, most of this is available in the web-based LJ editor. But not nearly as slick as this, and as user-friendly, and just generally cool!
Writing news:
I wish there was some. But although I may not have written much, I did, today, submit What happened while Don was watching the game to The Town Drunk. Also, my story Beans and marbles is selling like crazy on AnthologyBuilder, maintaining one of the top positions in the fifty best-selling stories. And last and best: the last four days of April will see me attend the second annual (-ish) Villa Diodati Expat Speculative Fiction Writers Workshop. Finally a chance to meet a bunch of my online partners in crime from Codex, work on our writing, and generally hang out in this insanely picturesque Gîte de Jaulzy in northern France.
