Blog

When I first tried Live Writer a while back it was ‘OK’ but just ‘OK’. It did most of the things that other posting apps did but it did not blow me away. I just downloaded it today after being reminded about it in Christophe’s post today. Wow. They did a lot of work on this application. One of the things I like the best is that it has a Web Layout view that obviously goes up to your provider and gets your template layout and sizes the editing page to match the settings of your blog. It also does the things you would expect like grabbing your categories and doing things like spell check and other formatting. It also does a good job of making image insertions easy. It has built in defaults for auto-thumbnailing your images but also makes it easy to save your preferences as the new default. It also provides an addin model so you can extend the functionality of the tool. Addins include adding custom “BlogThis” extensions to various browsers (as you would expect) but also to tools like Visual Studio (making it easier to blog your code directly from VS.) Others include an addin that makes it easy to post links to items in SkyDrive , insert streaming Sliverlight applications or link to Flickr pages. Nice Work Team! Check out the Writer Team Blog for the scoop .

Some people asked about the Man Cage. Here it is in full context. You can see that it goes all the way up the first flight. The last thing you want is bears on the roof! This picture also shows how the building is up on pilings so there is a lot of room under the building where someone on the stairs cannot see.