In case you missed it, Microsoft has allowed Windows Live Writer (WLW) to go open source. The new project is called Open Live Writer (OLW) and it’s taking the current version and breathing new life into it. WLW has been basically in a coma since 2012
It’s part of the .NET Foundation, an umbrella group for various open source projects that have come out of Microsoft. You read the announcement on the .NET Foundation blog. This is cool, very cool.
When this blog was hosted on Blogger, WLW was my tool of choice for writing and editing blogs. When I moved to a self-hosted WordPress site, I used the built in editor on the siter. Which is actually quite good. Good enough that I never bothered to switch WLW over to the new site. Now that OLW will be picking up where WLW ended, I plan on using it it again.
I’m looking forward to seeing some plugins come over to OWL. A long time ago, I wrote a plugin for WLW to generate image galleries for your blog from Smugmug. It was so long ago that the Microsoft site for hosting plugins is long gone.
I don’t think I would update the gallery plugin, with responsive design as the driver, it would be a better user experience to let the user go right to the SmugMug gallery. I would do one for pulling in images from SmugMug. Almost of the images on my blog come from my SmugMug galleries. I don’t store images with the blog. No point in duplicating the storage and it’s one less thing to worry about if I ever migrate the blog again.