While my days of using blogger are now a year in the past, I’m reading on some of your blogs that they’ve made some changes in the dashboard or whatever that are causing major frustration when you’re trying to put up a blog post.

So if you’re using Windows, I would suggest you give Windows Live Writer a shot.  I’m using it for this blog (albeit not for this post), and think it’s great.  It should work for blogger, wordpress, typepad (I think).

It will import your blog template, so it knows how you have things set up.  But it keeps everything offline while you write your post – but don’t forget to save every once in a while if you’re writing a long post or keep stepping away from it!  I had a post disappear after I accidentally clicked the X in the program because I hadn’t saved it.

My absolute favorite thing about Live Writer is how easy it is to add pictures to my posts.  I’m going with the very simple copy & paste method.  I’m either copying directly from my photo folder and pasting into the blog post, or (in the case of the Dear Olympians posts), I was doing the right-click copy on images from the internets and pasting into the blog post.  Except for the Evan Lysacek cockatoo photo – that was a bit of magic involving a paused video and the “Print Screen” key on my keyboard and paste directly into my Live Writer blog post.  You can even resize & crop your photos right there in the Live Writer screen. 

And you can always preview your post before you publish, so you know how everything will look when it gets published.

Of course, there’s also a way to add tags & categories and schedule posts.  The spell check works well – maybe a little too well, actually!

I haven’t figured out any functionality that the Live Writer software doesn’t have that I’m used to.

Word of caution – I always do the “custom installation” when downloading programs, so I can uncheck the extra crap Microsoft likes to throw in with it’s software.  Maybe some of you have never explored this option before, I’m fearless because if I totally screw something up, my geeky hubs can always reformat the whole computer.  If you don’t have a geeky husband, don’t despair – just look around, I bet you can find a geeky guy or girl to help you out. 

Note: The photos have nothing to do with this post, but there are a lot of words here with nothing to look at.  Since I’m not using Live Writer for this post, I couldn’t tell you how many words it is, but it’s a lot.  These photos are actually part of my efforts to document my 28th year of life in photos – I need to set up a separate blog for them, they’re residing solely in Facebook at the moment.  And in case you were wondering, Steve is making crepes from the Julia Child cookbook in an el cheapo IKEA wok.  And they tasted wonderful!