...effing fantastic.

I've been watching my forums (which have, to my great pleasure, actually seen some activity (mostly from the same four people, but whatever)), and there's a discussion going on now about blogging software.

If you know me, then you know I really hate discussions on blogging. To me, it's just another medium. Blogging about blogging is, like, one of the top ten stupidest things in the universe aside from arguments about Start Destroyers versus The Enterprise or eating your own poop (any, while I'm thinking about it, other people's).

That said, it is a different medium, and so it needs different tools. Obviously, you're going to have a hard time blogging with a pad of paper and your number two pencil. Word is definitely not a good solution. I'm sure some command-line dork out there somewhere has written a tool that takes input from the console, sends it to an RPG-driven database, and then runs a batch process that posts the content to a site as static HTML.

That, too, is stupid.

So I'll break with my rule occasionally. And not so much to blog about blogging, but to blog about tools.

For a while, I was recommending to everyone that they purchase BlogJet. I still recommend it - it's a great product. Scott has his own post going on about this, and he's listed his preferences in blogging tools. It's a good read, but I don't agree with his assessment of WLW. I get the impression that he'd give it an "OK" rating, and, according to his final thoughts...

Here's my final thought - why would a Product Group that offers a blogging editor and has their own blog, ask users to go to an MSN Group to offer feedback?  Isn't that kind of not-bloggy?  Remember earlier in your post where it was said blogging was a two-way medium?

...it seems to be based on a philosophical argument rather than a practical one. This doesn't have anything to do with the editor itself. Also, it's going to be much easier for the group to get feedback if it's dropped centrally. Blogging may be a two-way medium, but bug reporting/general feedback is probably best left centralized so the team doesn't have to go find it (to really find out who's linking to you, you have to use multiple tools - you can't just rely solely on your blog's ability to record trackbacks (at least not in my experience - with any blogging software)).

Anyway, here are some actual reasons behind why, after trying many tools, I think Windows Live Writer kicks ass (aside from my affiliation with the company that makes it):

• Even in the beta, installation was easier than it has been for any other blog tool I've tried - I had to do very little to get up and running
• It appears to support most major blogging APIs - this is getting to be more common, but I stayed away from RocketPost initially because it lacked support for .Text (which would have been so easy to implement)
• It pulls style information from your blog, so your writing experience really is WYSIWYG - there are no surprises when you hit "Publish"
• Before hitting "Publish" - and if you're paranoid like me - you can use the "Web Preview" layout option to see what the post would actually look like on your site (not just styles, but also any headers/footers/sidebars/etc.) - this can make a huge difference when it comes to proofing - for some reason, I'm much more likely to catch mistakes and typos only after I've seen my post online
• There are tons of little "creature-comfort" features - from the autofilling field for adding hyperlinks to the nice support for text/image wrapping, WLW does a lot of things for you that you'd often have to do in HTML mode in other editors
• The spell checker actually works (one of my biggest complaints with BlogJet is that the spell checker sucks)
• Support for setting publish dates, posting drafts, and other features (depending on your blogging software/API) is very cleanly implemented
• Plug-in support: I don't think I need to say anything else about that

If you haven't figured it out, I'm a convert.

And, to be honest (which is always scary when you're writing about products from your own company), I thought it was going to suck. But the reality is that Microsoft, at least in some areas, seems to "get" blogging much better than you'd expect. In many respects, I think Microsoft sets a great example, and with Windows Live Writer has produced a slick tool with which to write.

Check it out.