For the longest time I used Windows Live Writer (WLW). Back then (2012) you had to download this extra package called Windows Live Essentials to enhance your Windows experience with tools like Movie Maker, Mail, OneDrive , and a desktop-blogging app, very similar to other Office apps (with the ribbon UI, and the feeling of Microsoft Word, but tailored to create content for blogs).

WLW was a great tool, however, active development for it concluded in 2012.

Thankfully, a group of passionate Microsoft folks took on updating the tool, which eventually was released as open source, and today is maintained by them and the  community.

Enter Open Live Writer

You can download Open Live Writer from their website,  http://www.openlivewriter.org/. The source code on is available on GitHub. You can also follow the group’s latest updates on Twitter (@OpenLiveWriter)

I made this blog post using the tool, I have to admit the experience did not work flawlessly for me. Once my theme was imported, I was not able to do simple things like creating a new line to start a paragraph. I finished this post by first disabling the blog theme from the Blog Account tab. Once I did, I had no issues entering new lines, adding an image or doing basic formatting.

Publishing in draft mode worked as expected. Making changes meant to re-publish as draft, as the save button didn’t really work for me.

I’ll keep testing it and I’ll report back on any major findings.