I hate the Wordpress posting interface. It’s way too slow, no matter which browser or theme I use… I originally started using the Windows Live Writer, but I’m having a couple of issues with it. The first problem is that it kills the <!— more—> tag that Wordpress uses, which is something I could probably deal with. The really annoying issue for me, however, is that the trackbacks don’t seem to be working at all. I keep thinking I’m doing something wrong, but then I realize that it’s the client.

After installing BlogJet, I notice how similar Windows Live Writer looks… if BlogJet used the Office 2k3 color scheme, you’d barely be able to tell them apart. And now, I notice something else, something very odd. BlogJet automatically hyperlinks itself when you type “BlogJet� into the text area. I suppose that’s some shameless self-promotion, but that is really annoying.

Windows Live Writer definitely has the edge on ease of use of uploading images. In “BlogJet� (ha! no link!), you have to upload images via ftp… Windows Live Writer has some kind of magic instead.

Blogjet has an option to insert the More tag, which is kinda cool.

So, the Trackbacks are officially broken on my blog. I’ve been trying to ping back to my own server, but I guess that doesn’t work. Oh well. I’ll have to spend a few days using Blogjet.

Update: I believe that I’ve fixed the trackback issue in Wordpress, although I’m not sure why I’m having any problems in the first place… I changed xml-rpc.php from this:

$to_ping = $content_struct[’mt_tb_ping_urls’];

To this:

$to_ping = $content_struct[’mt_tb_ping_urls’];
if(is_array($to_ping)){
   foreach($to_ping as $pingthis){
      $pingurl .= $pingthis.” “
   }
}
$to_ping = $pingurl;

That completely solved the issue on my sandbox site. Always a good thing.

So, Windows Live Writer has briefly renewed my interest in having a blog. This definitely makes it simpler to edit my blog, and the integration with Wordpress is pretty impressive so far. It lets me edit any of my existing posts, and it even syncs the list of categories.

The key thing is going to be how well it integrates the uploading of pictures, because that is always difficult to deal with easily. Let’s see how well it integrates a screenshot of itself…..

This is incredible… that was about as easy as it gets. I can even set the size of the preview image, which links to the full image.

I guess blogging just got a whole lot easier, and it’s completely free.