Sankofa

First things first, let me assure you that this is not me and my typical Microsoft fanboy-ism speaking. Secondly, let me tell you that this post is not a credible source for the “best offline editor for Wordpress”; I have only tried Windows Live Writer, there are hundreds of offline blog editors out there.

Even during the first months of this blog, I was already made aware of the shortcomings of the Wordpress’ default online editor. One of the said shortcomings is that you need to manually “hack” TinyMCE’s settings to achieve the perfect WYSIWYG effect that matches your blog’s font setting. Another shortcoming is that it doesn’t have a default spell check engine that helps grammar offenders like me (although you can download a spell check plug-in from Wordpress but it doesn’t work as nice as Microsoft Word’s spell checker). So I ended up composing my posts in Microsoft Word and painstakingly copy/pasting them to my site; and let me tell you know, it is not a pretty sight (and Wordpress does not recommend it). What kept me from abandoning Word is the ability to have an “offline” backup of my blog posts and that just about it.

When I learned of offline editors for blogs, I quickly downloaded the (then) latest copy of Live Writer and I was disappointed! There were a lot of XML RPC errors and Live Writer did not automatically match my blog’s font to the editor’s font and worst of all, you have to jump a lot of hoops to change the editor’s font especially if it’s a non-standard Microsoft font! So I ditched the idea and went back to Microsoft Word.

Not so long ago, I got tired of composing my posts in Word and manually copy/pasting them to my blog so I contented myself to just use the online Wordpress editor (since I was able to fix TinyMCE’s setting) and just perform manual backups of the database from time to time. It was okay for quite some time until I got a bad RAM stick and have my Firefox randomly crash while composing a blog post which eventually resulted in me trying to remember what I typed in the post for the third time in the last five hours. It was a sobering sight – a programmer without mastery of his own tools and a crappy memory stick.

Continue reading “Windows Live Writer: The best offline editor for Wordpress or A biased Live Writer review” »