Guest post by Michael Aulia of Craving Tech.

I remember a few months ago there were a few discussions on Twitter with some Nuffnang bloggers (including myself) about the Windows Live Writer. I’ve been using the Windows Live Writer application myself to write my blog posts and still recommend it as a primary tool to blog. If you are still using your browser to write your blog posts then you are missing a lot!

How Windows Live Writer increases your productivity as a blogger

1) Write your blog offline, then send the draft online for the final touches
Write what you want, save as often as you like. In fact, you are most likely to click that Save button on the Windows Live Writer because it would normally take you a while to save when you are writing a draft online.

After you are happy with your draft, upload the draft to your blog with all the included images (more on this later).

2) It grabs your blog’s real layout and CSS styles

When you write your blog posts in Windows Live Writer, you will see your post as if you are writing it live on your blog. You can see every formatting that your blog has: font colors, header styles, and others. This allows you to get the right look and feel without having to click that preview button while you write.
3) Instant Preview

Tired of waiting for your browser to load when you want to preview your post? Windows Live Writer lets you preview the post offline quickly (since it has saved your blog’s layout in your computer). You can switch between the Preview and Editing mode in an instant, anytime.

4) Easy image insertion
If you are a blogger who likes to include photos/images on your blog post, this software is a life saver. This is the most powerful feature that I love the most in Windows Live Writer. Simply drag and drop an image from your hard drive/file explorer and the image will be inserted into the blog post. Put as many images as you like and they will all be uploaded in one go automatically once you send the draft to your blog online.
Ever get tired of clicking that browse and upload button on your blog to upload a few images? No more :) Windows Live Writer makes the process simple and fun to upload photos in batch to your blog.

Now, imagine doing this post (our Singapore tour during the Nuffnang Blog Awards 2009) without Windows Live Writer! With that plenty amount of images formatted in a nice way + texts, it will take you minutes if not hours of work!

5) Image formatting and styling tools

In Windows Live Writer, you can also easily resize the images by dragging the resize slider rather than putting a value or percentage. You can change the image alignment, links, and even add a nice effect to it (shadow, reflection, etc) only with a few clicks. It even supports watermarking so you can always have a nice copyright text on every image/photo you have on your posts.

For example, below is an example of a photo I used for an iPad stand review with a shadow effect and watermarking using Windows Live Writer:

Best of all, you can set these settings as a default preset so they will be applied automatically as soon as you drag an image into the editor!

There are other things such as a word count, inserting a map, and others that you need to explore for yourself.

Windows Live Writer works on most popular blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger (plus a few others) and can be downloaded at Microsoft Windows Live Essentials. If you are already using Windows Live Writer as your primary blogging tool, feel free to share how it has improved your productivity in writing a blog post!

About the author:

Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Michael Aulia of Craving Tech. Thanks for sharing your knowledge, Michael!