Using Live Writer for Blogging
by Chris Guld, www.GeeksonTour.com
I’ve written about Live Writer a couple of times: Article 1, Article 2. It is a free program downloadable from Microsoft, and the exceptional feature is that it resides locally on your computer and it will upload your blog posts to several different blogging systems. I now use it almost exclusively for all my blog posts – both Blogger and Wordpress. I’m using it to create this post on RV.net’s blog and I use it to create blog posts for my personal blog on Blogger.
It’s single-click easy to add a map to your blog post using Live Writer. I especially like the plugin that links directly to my Picasa Web Album for photos. I also like that it reminds me to add labels or categories to each post. To understand the importance of labels and categories, see last week’s post.
Let me show you exactly what I’m talking about:
View more tutorial videos on blogging.
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Are “categories” the same as tags? Thanks MJB
Michael – Categories and Tags are usually different things. Categories are major groupings, kinda like chapters in a book (except one post can appear in different categories.) Tags are more plentiful, each post can have many, many tags.
In Blogger we don’t have both. Blogger just has ‘Labels’ which are somewhere in between Categories and Tags.
It’s more of an art than a science … how to use Categories and Tags. They are just two tools to help posts get found. Tags can be more universally web-searchable. Categories can be used to organize posts in a blog. For example, the menus at the top of the RV.net blog are automatically created by using the categories of the posts.
Does that answer your question?
A Mac OSX equivalent of Live Writer is Ecto. Cost just short of $18.