Recently when using my new laptop I noticed a small icon in Internet explorer that I hadn't realised was there before, this icon was for windows live writer which I'm actually using to compose this blog post.

Basically it looks as if Microsoft have pulled the new blogging components out of Word 2007, beefed them up a bit and made a free standalone blogging application out of them, which seems to be really quite good.

I've used desktop blogging software before, w.bloggar, ecto, etc. but none of them feel as useful and as neat as this one.

You can install windows live writer as part of the new windows live pack which includes things like windows live messenger, desktop search etc. And though I wouldn't necessarily use all the programs in the live pack, live writer and obviously messenger live are two great products.

I'm not one to evangelise about Microsoft, and it's rare that I notice something they've done that really adds to my day to day computing experience but today they have, and if they continue along this route with a few more well thought out, useful, stable applications maybe I won't convert to Linux full time...

Update:
I've just found a slightly more indepth review which readers of this post may also find useful:
http://www.easywordpress.com/labs/offline-wysiwyg-wordpress-editor-windows-live-writer/trackback/

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I came across this error earlier this week so thought I'd post the solution (well a link to it) here for reference.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323626

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One of the best features of Word 2007 is that you can blog directly from it, making it even easier to upload content to the web.

In some regards it’s not as advanced as ecto (or the free w.Bloggar) for interfacing with and editing raw blog content but in others it really is.

For example I have a lot of old word based science essays that I thought I’d like to publish on my personal blog and as such these contain a large quantity of things like this:

When word saves a page as html for example it can convert all these math-type/equation editor plug-in objects to images which is fine if you JUST want the page as a web page.

Invariably though, if anything is saved as a webpage from word it is bloated with excess styles (hence the need for Dreamweaver’s clean up word html command) and you’ll generally want to edit it in some way to make it look more presentable, as the presentation offered by word is usually somewhat lacking.

So when you save an essay with a lot of equation objects in it, that leads to tonnes of files which are a pain to copy back into a blog manually or edit along with the page content in Dreamweaver – literally hours can be spent reformatting the document.

Word 07’s publish to blog function though cuts out all of this rubbish and generally does an excellent job in maintaining formatting (possibly because it may be restricted to sending data for the post in some predetermined minimal format or it doesn’t have to ‘worry’ about styles or html page structure so much) and also uploading the images with the correct paths/associations – which is AMAZING!

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Note:

This tutorial is only for people comfortable with modifying the registry.

I do not accept any responsibility for any damage you may do to your system by following this tutorial either correctly or incorrectly.

1. Open the registry editor by going to run… in the start menu and typing regedit
2. You will see a tree of keys to the left and values to the right double click  HKEY_CURRENT_USER to expand the tree
3. Open Software, Microsoft, Internet explorer in the same way as in 2
4. Right click the Internet explorer option in the menu on the left (that you just expanded) and choose New -> Key, for the name of the new key type MenuExt
5. Right click the new MenuExt key and add a another new key named &Export To Excel, just as you did in step 4
6. Left click the new &Export To Excel key to highlight it and in the right hand pane you’ll see a default value setting double click this and in the value box type: res://[your path to excel goes here] /3000  
   On my machine for example I type: res://C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE /3000
7. Close down all internet explorer windows and close regedit when you next open internet explorer you should have the export to excel option

References:

http://www.jfitz.com/tips/search.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/277621

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