There’s a few interesting developments in the blog authoring scene within the last month or so.
Here, we’ll take a look at a new WordPress release, a desktop blogging tool and a new Windows browser.
#1 WordPress 2.2
WordPress 2.2 includes a number of new features as well as over 200 bug fixes. What’s new?
- WordPress Widgets integration – allows you to easily customize or rearrange certain areas within your weblog. Just drag and drop!
- Full Atom support – this is much like RSS.
- New Blogger importer – easily import your Blogger posts and comments just by entering your login.
- Infinite comment stream.
- Better blog protection during plugin activation.
- Core plugin and filter optimizations.
- Future WYSIWYG support for Safari (Apple’s browser).
#2 Windows Live Writer Beta 2
Blogging over the web can be a painful affair especially if you have a slow connection. Solution? Desktop blog authoring! Microsoft Windows Live Writer (WLW) is one of them. WLW supports most ubiquitous blog platforms out there including Blogger and WordPress. If you have more than one blog, WLW would definitely be useful as you have now a unified way to author and publish your posts.
With WLW, you enjoy speedy WYSIWYG blog editing. Tag support (including Technorati, del.icio.us, etc) is built in.
Beta 2 of WLW introduces the following features:
- Inline spell checking
- Table editing
- Ability to add categories
- Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
- Support for excerpts and extended entries
- Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
- Paste Special
- and many more…
WLW is fully extensible with support for plugins. e.g. there are plugins for embedding Flickr photos and videos (like YouTube).
#3 Safari 3 for Windows
Apple’s Safari browser is now available on Windows albeit in beta form.
If you’re running on Windows and you’re feeling unsure how your blog page will be rendered on the Safari browser on Apple, now you can test your page out on Safari for Windows. It’s still buggy in some parts, but overall, it’s fairly usable even in its current non-final form.
Happy blogging!
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