A long time ago, I used to use Windows Live Writer to post to blogs. And then Microsoft took it away. Because who cared about enabling blog writing, right?
Today I discovered Open Live Writer – an open source recreation of the original. It has a website, which seems a little dusty, but it worked well enough to download this program I’m writing in right now, which took about five minutes to set itself up.
It feels like an old application. It has that slightly cramped and clunky pre-Windows 10 feel: thin where it should be thick, cornered where it could be rounded, a little gappy here and there, icons just a bit too small. But right now it works smoothly, and is just simple enough to remove the frictions that most online publishing introduces now.
I was actually looking for a free visual HTML editor, because I can’t code and I want to figure out the envelope edge of the newsletter system. But finding this was a pleasant surprise.