Checking out Windows Live Writer

I was reading Alec Saunders' blog the other day and he mentioned testing out the Windows Live Writer beta. So here I am doing the same. Pebble supports the MetaWeblog API, which is also supported by Live Writer, so it seems to be working. The only thing I really had to figure out when setting it up was the address for metaweblog calls, which happens to be http://hostname/pebble/xmlrpc.

So far, I like it. Rich text editing. All the little hotkey shortcuts I expect are there - Ctrl+K inserts or edits a link, Ctrl+I makes things italic. Pretty sweet. There is a claim that it will insert pictures, which has always been a pain with pebble, so I'll try that now.

Darn. Turns out MetaWeblog doesn't support image publishing.

Live Writer also supports inserting maps for some reason, so I tried to insert a map of my office. It was pretty easy to insert too - just type in the address and it goes there. Zoom in, zoom out, pan, add a pushpin. No way to have it do directions yet. It will be interesting to see what it looks like when it is published.

Darn. It has an image, and that doesn't work (as noted above).

I'll have to get Julie set up with this. The basic functionality is cool.

Update - while the MetaWeblog API doesn't support image uploading, it does support FTP uploading. So (hopefully) as soon as I get an FTP server set up and configured correctly it will be able to publish pictures more easily.