How To: Write Blog Post Offline

Most blogging platforms offers built-in editors and that is one of their strengths and most will only work with a connection. However there are some situations where you may need to have an offline blog editor to help you out such as:

There is no Internet connection and you still want to prepare a blog post or two. All you need is your laptop and this will increase your productivity significantly. So you'll never loose that elusive great inspiration again.
Some blog editors are not that user-friendly. You may find certain features are hard to achieve such as inserting table, inserting and manipulating images and media etc.
You want the ability to schedule posts to be published at a later time instead of immediate publishing. In some systems this feature may not be available while in some others the feature may not be obvious to the post author.
You own more than one blog and you want the ability to manage all blog postings from just a single place.
You wish to have see post layout preview where you can see how a post will look like when published according to the theme or template in use.
While most word processors could handle some of these features but most may not support publishing posts directly from them. You’ll have to copy contents from the word processor and paste them to online blog editor and you find this as not that elegant.

Now, most of wants and wishes above can be addressed by a powerful software tool from Microsoft and it is called Windows Live Writer. And, it is FREE.

Microsoft has also released an update to this already superb tool. You can get Windows Live Writer 2009 here.

Note: If you’re using Windows 7, Live Writer is already installed in most cases.

Here are some of the benefits that's worth noting:

Insert images and manipulating them easily. You could add drop shadow, photo frame, watermark etc so it saves you from opening your image editing software except for more demanding tasks.
Painless table insertion and editing. Some blog systems don't provide easy way for you to insert tables. May be they don't like you using tables :)
Scheduled publishing - set your post to be published on a date and time you prefer. You may write several posts in advance and get them posted at an interval you chose while you sunbathe by the beach for a week.
Able to work on multiple blog systems, sites and posts from one central place is simply fantastic.
You can view your post as normal, web preview, html codes etc.
Editing is much more efficient as there's little time lost to uploading-edit-uploading cycles.
The benefits are extendable and can be suited to your need as numerous plug-ins are available to choose from.
Suitable for many web platforms such as Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint and many others.

I am keeping this one to the last. Imagine something goes down while you are writing a blog post, say the browser crashes, a disconnection or power blacks out and you're already on the last sentence just seconds before you hit the "publish" button.

If your blogging platform doesn't have the auto-save feature, you know what you’ll ended up with – a lost posting and a lot of swearing. So having a tool that auto-save your article every few minutes is definitely a life saver. It can also serve as an offline backup of your posts on top of other backup mechanisms you may have in place.

There are many more pluses than I could write and you may find other features that appeal to you too.

Just one little snag is that not all blogging systems are supported so if you're don't belong to Blogger or WordPress family, chances are your blog type may not work with Live Writer.

Also, whenever a blog platform is updated, Live Writer may take a while to follow suit and some new features may not be available immediately.

Alright! If you need it or just want to give it a try, download windows live writer for free now.

Also, there are more bells and whistles you can add on by getting the plug-ins here. Yes, they are mostly free too.

I hope Live Writer will make your editing and posting a lot more enjoyable and productive.

Do You Want A Simpler Editor?

If you can live with just a basic blog editor and don’t need all the bells and whistles that WLW offer, BlogDesk is a very good alternative. Even setting up for a Drupal based site is just a breeze. Try it out.

Enjoy Writing From Your Firefox Browser?

Then get yourself the ScribeFire add-on. It allows you to create, edit and publish your blog posts directly within Firefox and it’s quite well featured to. More about ScribeFire here.

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