First, why do you need to write blog post offline?

Listed below are some of the reasons I could think of:

• Posts can be prepared anywhere even at places without Internet connection. All you need is your laptop and this may increase your productivity significantly. So you’ll never loose that elusive great inspiration again.
• Some blog systems text editors are not that user-friendly. You may find certain features are hard to achieve such as inserting table, inserting and manipulating images and media etc.
• Have the ability to schedule posts to be published at a later time instead of immediate publishing. In some systems this feature is available but may not be obvious to the post author.
• If you own more than one blog, ability to manage all of them from a single place can be a lot easier.
• Post layout preview is available where you can see how a post will look like when published according to the theme or template in use.
• While word processors could handle some of these features but most may not support publishing posts directly from them. Having to copy from a word processor and paste into online blog editor may not be so elegant.

Most of these were addressed by a powerful software tool from Microsoft and it is called MS Live Writer. And, it is FREE.

Here are some of the benefits that’s worth noting:

• Insert images and manipulating them easily. You could add drop shadow, photo frame, watermark etc so it saves you from opening your image editing software except for more demanding tasks.
• Painless table insertion and editing. Some blog systems don’t provide easy way for you to insert tables. May be they don’t like you using tables
• Scheduled publishing – set your post to be published on a date and time you prefer. You may write several posts in advance and get them posted at an interval you chose while you sunbathe by the beach for a week.
• Able to work on multiple blog systems, sites and posts from one central place is simply fantastic.
• You can view your post as normal, web preview, html codes etc.
• Editing is much more efficient as there’s little time lost to uploading-edit-uploading cycles.
• The benefits are extendable and can be suited to your need as numerous plug-ins are available to choose from.
• Suitable for many web platforms such as Blogger, WordPress, Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint and many others.

I am keeping this one to the last. Imagine something goes down while you are writing a blog post, say the browser crashes, a disconnection or power blacks out and you’re already on the last sentence just seconds before you hit the "publish" button. If your blogging platform doesn’t have the auto-save feature, you know what you ended up with. So having a tool that auto-save your article every few minutes is definitely a life saver. It can also serve as an offline backup of your posts on top of other backup mechanisms you have in place.

There are many more pluses than I could write and you may find other features that appeal to you too.

One little snag is that not all blogging systems are supported so if you’re don’t belong to Blogger or WordPress family, chances are your blog type may not work with Live Writer. Also, whenever a blog platform is updated, Live Writer may take a while to follow suit and some new features may not be available immediately.

Alright! If you need it or just want to give it a try, download windows live writer for free now.

Also, there are more bells and whistles you can add on by getting the plug-ins here. Yes, they are free too.

I hope that Live Writer will make your editing and posting a lot more enjoyable and productivity boosting.

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