I mentioned the beta release of Windows Live Writer a few weeks ago. What is it? Basically it is a blogging client that can be used to compose, edit and post blog articles with a wide variety of blogging systems. I’ve looked at quite a few of these during the past couple years, even liked some of them (Performancing for Firefox, for instance) but this one has pretty much blown me away. If nothing else, it makes image management just so painless.
But yet, not all has been smooth sailing. Until last night I was having one devil of a time with said image management. Everytime I’d attach an image to an article, it would get resized. So, I would either view HTML of the article and remove the size attributes on the img element, or I wouldn’t attach any images but instead post as a draft to my blog and do the images there. Now, that latter approach largely diminished the appeal of this tool!
Last night I finally have my “eureka” moment. That moment that can also be described as “duh chris, you stupid user!” /sigh Anywho… I finally paid closer attention to what’s going on when attaching an image and noticed some things.
Size matters. Now kids, don’t take that one the wrong way! Look at the picture here, this is one of the sidebar properties that show up when an image is selected. See the “small, medium, large, original” there? You click the one you want to determine how the image is displayed. So, all I had to do was click “original” and no more messing with my size. Sheesh, talk about an epiphany!
Now, even with that size matter resolved, I was still wrestling a bit with style. Once again, paying closer attention to the image properties (this time under the layout tab) I realized I was again missing the boat. There are properties there for border (the sample picture here has all the border options shown). All I had to do was set it to “Inherit from weblog” and things looked like I expected.
Now, I’m MUCH more excited about this thing. I’m guessing that somewhere along the line I was experimenting with it and tripped over the “save image settings as defaults” button. About all I need now is an integrated way to add my UTW tags from here and I’m set. Until then, I draft everything up with WLW beta, post to blog as draft, and then add the tags and Post. Easy enough.
Possibly Related posts:
August 29th, 2006 
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People have written about UTW/Windows Live Writer approaches here: http://www.obharath.net/blog/2006/08/27/windows-live-writer-utw-and-tag4writer/ and and here: http://www.davidbrunelle.com/2006/08/21/windows-live-writer-and-ultimate-tag-warrior/
Hope this helps (:
Well, the UTW author herself! Thanks Christine, I’ll definitely have a look at those.
Sometimes people are lucky enough to be graced by my presence (;
[...] Handy suggested it. I tried it. I love it. It works. Setup was relatively painless, but probably not for a novice, and it even does images well inserted into the post with CTRL V, which impresses me. Thanks Handy. Tagging doesn’t work right yet, and I don’t feel like jumping through hoops right now so it’s post-edit for me. [...]