Blogging Made Simpler

I loved blogging at first sight click! It is just so much fun sharing ideas, dialoguing with other teachers through comments, learning about new blogs, and being part of the blogging community. There was one thing that I was frustrated with though right from the beginning: composing posts in Blogger. It took a long time to upload pictures, it was difficult to change pictures once they were inserted in a post, and extra spaces kept appearing between paragraphs and images. That last one really drove me crazy!

Then I heard about Windows Live Writer, and all my frustrations went away! It is a program you install on your computer and is completely free! You can download it by clicking here. It is part of Windows Live Essentials. You can download all of the Windows Live Essentials products or just chose to download Writer.  

Once you have Live Writer downloaded,  I would go to the Blog Account tab. Here you will be able to choose for Live Writer to look like your blog. You type in your blog address, and it will update your Live Writer program with you blog’s header, background paper, etc.

      

You are now ready to write a post. I find that working in Live Writer is a lot like working in Word or Publisher. The toolbar is similar and full of great options. The picture of the Home toolbar below is a little blurry, but hopefully you will get an idea of what it is like. One thing to note is that as you type in Live Writer, it will type in Times New Roman as a default, but when you publish the post to your blog it will automatically change to the font you have set on your blog.

The best part about Live Writer is how easy it is to work with pictures. You insert pictures just as you would in a Word or Publisher document, which means no more waiting for pictures to upload! Once you insert a picture it is so easy to rotate, center, crop, or change the size of the picture. There are also picture effects and frame choices. Check out the Picture Tools Format toolbar below.

Once you are done writing your blog post, you can preview it right in Live Writer. I love the preview mode because it allows you to check and make sure that your hyperlinks are working. Then you can click on Publish, and it will automatically send it to your blog and post it. If you need to stop working on a post and save it for later, you have two options: you can save it right on Live Writer, or you can send it to your Blogger account as a draft.   

I am so glad I heard about Live Writer! It has definitely made blogging faster and easier. I am not very tech savvy so there are probably lots of great Live Writer features that I don’t know about. If you are a Live Writer user, what is your favorite feature?

Just a friendly reminder that there is one day left to enter my $20 TPT giveaway. Click on the image below to enter!