When I first heard about LiveWriter I did not really see myself using it but now that a lot of bloggers on my blogroll are raving about it I thought I would give the thing a spin.
It does offer a better writing experience than working in a web page but I keep feeling so disconnected from my blog; writing from an external program. It feels somewhat like steering a radio controlled vehicle coming at you
Setting up works beautifully however. I was able to configure my (somewhat older) WordPress installation with no problems besides me forgetting the correct password. After I few tries I found it and everything else worked like a charm.
I am missing my post categories though. It seems LiveWriter is not aware of WordPress’ categories so I will have to assign them using the WordPress admin later. This is somewhat unfortunate.
One thing that is a major show stopper for me though is the fact that I can not find a reasonable way to write up code examples. On my blog I use Amit Gupta’s excellent iG:SyntaxHiliter WordPress plugin to light up my code snippets (indicated by square bracket[sourcename] tags but I need some line breaks between those tags and LiveWriter wants to eat them up. So for now, I still have to edit my posts manually if I want some nicely formatted code in there and the extra (non-formatted) HTML and that is inserted by LiveWriter does not make things easier.
It seems LiveWriter knows about the pre tag because when I use it in the HTML view and then switch to the Web Layout view it respects it. When I switch back to HTML view my new lines are still intact so it seems this behaviour is hacked; or worked-around like some may say. This does not really help me though because I need to use square brackets to indicate the highlighting to be used by the iG:SyntaxHiliter preprocessor and pre tags will not do.
There may be ways to work around this but I would really like it if I could map some abitrary tag strings to actual tags known by LiveWriter. In this case I could easily map the block bracket tags to pre tags so that LiveWriter would at least know to leave my formatting alone.
I guess that there will be some LiveWriter plugin able to provide syntax highlighting off-line so the HTML will be properly formatted even before it is send to your blog but I am not sure if this is the best approach. To me it seems right to have the preprocessor (PHP in my case) handle this job.