As you know, I've played around recently with blogging from Word 2007, and it was pretty good. I had a few issues with it, one of which was that IE7b3 has broken ftp on my work PC, so I couldn't publish images at all, but in general it does the trick nicely.

One thing Word lacks in the blogging department, though, is the ability to hand-edit the HTML before you post. Word does a mighty fine job of converting your text into XHTML, but not everything is perfect, so it's nice to be able to tweak the code a little. Plus, it doesn't have the ability to add img tags to reference pictures on the web - something that I do quite often.

Anyway, the other day Microsoft released a new blogging tool - Windows Live Writer. I had a post that I'd already put together in Word but had not yet published (my "Book Meme" post below), so I installed WLW and gave it a try.

Turns out it rocks! It has HTML editing, plus the ability to insert an image given just the URL of the image (creating an img tag in your post)! One small thing that didn't work - it couldn't download the stylesheet for my blog. Not sure if that's because I run a custom blog theme or what. No biggie, though.

So I think I'll stick with WLW for now. Very pleased.

ps. Here's Dave's short review of the same product (with some screenshots). Looks like he was impressed too!