The Windows Live Writer tool is still in beta, but so many people are out there using it and telling me that I need to try it that I finally gave it a go. It does seem to have a prettier UI than my trusty BlogJet and it does offer some nice inline image editing tools that Blogjet doesn't have such as the dropshadow effect above or the photo edge seen here on the right
. It doesn't have Blogjet's ability to get the previously posted blog entries for editing. While the Live Writer does seem to be able to view the most recent post, BlogJet allows you to go back several entries with it's unique History reader and make modifications to any previous entry. I'm not sure if that's a big deal to me personally because I don't have a problem editing the older entries via the online editor. However, I can see that being really annoying to some people.
Finally, Live Writer does offer the ability to include maps in a blog entry. This is a nice extension of Virtual Earth and has been gratuitously included in this post just to show it off. While I chose to show the Street location of the Alpharetta Microsoft offices, I could have chosen the Aerial or even Birds' Eye View. All in all, this looks like a nice tool, but I'm waiting to post this draft to see if it does something with the blog title and the page URL. That's my biggest gripe about Blogjet - the title of the blog doesn't automatically become the friendly URL. Let's see what happens...
Microsoft's Alpharetta Offices