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.

In the spirit of optimism and embracing change, I gave Windows Live Writer another try and I was surprised that most of the frustrations I experienced months ago are now fixed in the latest version of Live Writer!

Live Writer will now “automatically” detect your blog settings and make the appropriate change for you! It’s the perfect WYSIWYG experience. It’s like using Microsoft Word – the familiar feel of "Word” is everywhere. I will go out on a limb here and say that it’s like Microsoft Word for blogging.

The software is so great that I can even do inline images now (like so! Look Ma, no hands!) As a bonus to developers, Live Writer is extensible which mean that you can write your own extensions for it! But before you do, check the online gallery first because someone might have already written it. I’ve already downloaded the Polaroid Picture plug-in which is responsible for the nice Polaroid picture effect on the image above and the Insert Videos plug-in which allows me to embed Youtube Videos quickly!

Never mind the awesome plug-ins ecosystem for Live Writer, the WYSIWYG perfection should be enough to make you jump ship! Allow me to demonstrate (and test this baby for the first time):

Text effects: Bold, Italic, Underlined, Strikethrough

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

• This
• is
• a
• bulleted
• item
• list

1. One
2. Two
3. Three

This is a quote!

This is a hyperlink.

PS: Me trying out to edit an existing blog post via Live Writer.

And all this without typing a single HTML code. Here’s the screenshot of the editor (compare it with the actual post and you will be amazed!):

However, its not always rainbows and roses. Live Writer have some downsides, too. And if we’re talking about downsides, we can never exclude the dreaded XMLRPC problems. Personally, I have resolved most of my XMLRPC problems but I can’t seem to fix a particular XMLRPC problem related to retrieving my previous blog posts (useful for referencing your old posts). Good thing that there’s a manual workaround; but if you’re patient, you can try to fix the problem by editing some PHP scripts and disabling a handful of Wordpress plug-ins.

Another downside is that Live Writer doesn’t support the "All-in-One SEO Pack” Wordpress plug-in by default, so you have to download a “bridge” before you can add the SEO details using Live Writer. For the lazy and untrusting ones, there’s a manual workaround. Publish your post as draft and add the SEO details via the Wordpress dashboard. That way, you’ll be sure that the SEO will really work.

Just like most Microsoft products, installing Live Writer will also install unwanted software so be sure to uncheck them during installation.

Live Writer is an awesome offline editor for Wordpress on its own merits. If you don’t believe me, try it out for a spin! It’s free!