Ok so I've had a chance to use the live writer tool now on several blogs.  I have used it here on OfficeRocker which is hosted on community server and on fullyvetted.com which is a WordPress blog.  So how does it compare with using OneNote 2007 as your blogging tool?

What I like about live writer:

  • It really is easy to use.  It is very smart at working out how to connect to your blog just using the url.  With WordPress this was faultless.
  • The use of the theme in the post writer is fab - you immediately know what the post will look like and you can do a web preview too.
  • The image handling is really great.  not just alignment settings but it has basic photo editing built in, resizing and autocreation of thumbnails as well as drop shadow borders.
  • It saves your draft and published posts which is good to have as a backup (OneNote does this too).
  • The WYSIWYG interface makes it easier to work with styles like header2 etc.  This is harder in OneNote because it doesn't inherit the blog's theme.  It also means it's better at assigning categories.
  • I like the setting to open a link in a new window.

What I like about OneNote as a blog writer:

  • Blog posts are often organic and benefit from more of a "scrapbook" approach to build the idea.  OneNote is better at that.
  • I like the tabbed page interface in OneNote.  I like the organisational flexibility of it.
  • Search is easy in OneNote, even indexing text OCRd in pictures.  I can't figure out how to do search in Livewriter
  • I use OneNote for all my other notes and I love the tight integration with Outlook.  It is easy to push content from Outlook through to OneNote and reuse in a post.  This includes posts from the rss reader in Outlook.  I don't see any integration with other products from Live Writer.  I'm not sure how I could export content from it whereas this is easier from OneNote. 

Other things that bug me:

  • Live writer won't let me post my pictures to a SharePoint site.  It only has ftp as a publishing mechanism
  • blogs.msdn.com is running an older version of community server so the picture posting doesn't work.  It does work fine on blogs.technet.com though because its on a later version. grrr
  • OneNote 2007 won't seem to post pictures to WordPress - or at least I can't get it to work on 4228
  • Live Writer doesn't seem to have a scroll bar if your post is longer than the window.
  • If you change the title during editing on Live Writer and save draft, it saves another copy of the post.