A while ago, in our personal blog I wrote about discovering Windows Live Writer. It is a program, freely downloadable from Microsoft, which allows you to compose blog entries offline. It works with several blogging systems, including the 2 I use – Blogger and WordPress. After you compose your blog post, it will take care of uploading it to the web, including the pictures.

Last week, we had some trouble with our Internet connection and I wanted to write a blog post, so I dusted off Live Writer and gave it another shot. It’s really an amazing little program! I’m using it now, even when my Internet connection is working fine. You may have noticed a couple of my posts last week had maps as part of the blog post, and the maps don’t come from my normal Google Maps. They’re from Virtual Earth, Microsoft’s competitor to Google Earth. That’s because I used Live Writer to insert the map. Since Live Writer is by Microsoft, it uses Microsoft’s maps.

Live Writer makes it just SOO easy to insert a map. It’s also waayy easy to insert a link, and the links automatically open in a new window! If you’ve been using Blogger, you know that making a link open in a new window is a painful process there. If you hate how Blogger adds new photos to the top of your post, you’ll love how Live Writer adds them at your cursor position. AND, you can even set it up to so that your photos get uploaded to your own hosted webspace (FTP) rather than Blogger’s servers!

Maybe the best part is that, since you’re writing the post on your computer and letting Live Writer upload it to Blogger, you have an automatic backup. The drafts are all on your computer. If something happened to your blog, these drafts could be re-uploaded.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. It’s a free download at the link above. The first thing is to set up your blog by clicking on the Blog menu and ‘Add blog account…’

From then on it’s pretty much like writing your post on Blogger. Give the post a title, type the text, use the ‘insert’ options at the right to add pictures, links, maps, etc. When you’re done, click ‘Publish’ in the upper left corner. If I hear from enough of you, I might just do some tutorial videos on Live Writer.

For all our videos on using Blogger to make a blog – it’s EASY, really, really easy! – see: Blogging Tutorials page

And to see *lots* of RVers blogs – many of whom learned how from our tutorials – go to our Blog listings page. If you have a blog, you can list it there too.

Related posts:

1. A Picasa Plug-In for Live-Writer
2. Use Live Writer for Blogging
3. Blogging to Alaska
4. Adding Video to your Blog
5. Free Computer Software For Travelers