Randomosity, Simplified.

This post does not include a recipe. This post does not include anything step-by-step. This post does not include anything of intellectual merit.

This post is dedicated to a nice, big bowl of pure, unadulterated, gushing.

What am I gushing over, you ask? Something that only a nerdy, tech-obsessed blogger like myself could be gushing about…Windows Live Writer. After laboriously copying and pasting entries into that tiny window provided on my regular Blogger account and dealing with all the annoying idiosyncrasies therein, this little software download has changed my life. Okay, it probably hasn’t changed my life, that might be an exaggeration. If I downloaded it and then automatically won a million dollars, that would change my life. This has just streamlined my writing process. That being said, even if it doesn’t allow me to buy a new car, Windows Live Writer has saved me a bucketload of stressful dealings with my previous text editor.

By far, my favorite element of this program is its photo editing capabilities. In the past, if I wanted a photo to be larger than the three choices given by Blogger, I’d have to go in and manually edit each piece of HTML to change the height and width, completely guessing/hoping/praying that the proportions would be right. Now, I can still select different sizes, but I can also type in a certain height or width and the program automatically keeps it in proportion. Allow me to demonstrate….

I’m totally geeking out right now. Considering the fact that usually one of my favorite parts of a blog is the photos, this is awesome.

I heart big photos.

Besides changing the size of the photos, you can also tilt them to different angles, play with a few borders, add watermarks, as well as fiddle with a few basic photo editing tools.

All I did here was add a watermark. The tilting and borders made things a little too crazy. Remember, it’s all about moderation people.

Beyond photos, the software is pretty simple and very easy to use. I was able to figure it out within 30 minutes. It’s mostly just the basic stuff you’d find on any blog’s text editor, just infinitely simpler. It incorporates all the text features that Blogger has, like font size, bullets and numbering, links, and all that jazz as well. Allow me to demonstrate: Here’s a handy little bulleted list of some of the changes that I’ve made to my blog recently.

• Switched to using Windows Live Writer to compose blog posts
  • Oh…em…gee, it lets you do multiple bullet lists! My inner geek is freaking out right now.
  • This would totally allow me to blog my lecture notes this semester, although something tells me that it would cause my readership to take a complete nosedive.
    • Unless you like the idea of reading my Government notes.
• Changed the page width
• Amped up the photo size
• Got rid of odd photo borders
• Added photo watermarks

See? It’s really quite a lovely addition to the whole blogging experience. Between slow photo uploads and wonky spacing issues on Blogger, Windows Live Writer has improved the whole process tremendously. Providing that the actual upload of this post goes well, I highly recommend it for any of my dear, lovely, wonderful blogging counterparts as an excellent piece of software.