How-To Tuesday: Write in Windows Live Writer

With my review of the program now written, I decided to show you just how easy it can be to write a post in Windows Live Writer.

First things first, open the pro gram and select the blog you wish to work in.

Begin writing the post. You will need to know a couple things to be able to format it the way you want. To get a new line you have to hit Enter while holding the Shift key (a little annoying but you get used to it pretty quickly). The reason for this is because just hitting enter gives you a break – this will separate text from an image so that it is all one giant link.
When you get to a point where you want an image in it, simply find it on the computer and drag it into the program (you can also click insert on the right hand side and follow the prompts, but dragging it is easier and faster in my opinion).

Place the image where you want it in the post and then select your style, etc on the right hand side (must have the image selected for the options to appear). I usually choose Text Wrapping of Centered, Borders of Inherit from Blog in the Picture tab and then under the Advanced tab, Medium for my Photography blog and Small for this blog. It is under the Advanced tab that you can edit your image as well, if you haven't done so already.

Once you have your images in the post and your writing is done, you can set up your tags. Clicking on the Set Categories bar at the bottom will bring up a list of your existing tags. Either scroll through the list and select the ones you want, or start typing and then hit enter as the list shortens based on your entry. Once you are done, click out of the list and your tags will be ready to go. If you want a new tag, simply write it in the box and click add.

Once you are done, you can either save the post as a draft or publish it directly to your blog using the buttons on the top left hand side, right under the normal file, edit, view, etc options. To schedule the post to publish later, select the date and time in the bottom right hand corner and then publish it.
You can also insert videos, albums and tables into posts. Either click the items in the right hand side, or drag the item (for the case of videos) into the post itself. For albums, you can once again use the list on the right hand side, or drag multiple photos at once into the post. Live Writer will prompt you asking if you want to insert them as individual photos or as an album.
It really is just that easy. Hope that helped.