I think my recent reduction in post frequency, whilst mostly due to various events in my personal life, has been somewhat affected by growing frustrations with my authoring tools.

As I’ve previously noted, I was using the performancing.com firefox extension for authoring my blog posts. Its since renamed to Scribefire and had a few improvements however in the end its just not pleasant to write into an area that is a third of your viewing area. You can expand it however this makes the reason you would use a plugin for authoring reasonably redundant.

Browser extensions – particularly firefox ones can seem a touch sluggish and I assume this is because they are mostly interpreted javascript.

I also did a few of my posts in the editor interface provided in the WordPress administration area. Its okay for last minute edits and applying of links but in general its got a few niggling issues with the editor that you constantly come across.

Time to scout for a standalone, hopefully native application for authoring. I thought I had seen one from Microsoft but decided to Google around anyway in case there was something out there that was widely regarded as the preferred post authoring tool.

Windows Live Writer appeared in the results so I figured I may as check it out as it was a free download and of course would be a native windows application.

A painless install later and I was up and writing my post. And now this one. The interface is clean, attractive and simple. The editing area is presented like a blank sheet of paper which seems to beg for words to be entered into it.

If your OS is windows and you run a blog, I recommend checking it out.

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