A lot of "power bloggers", prefer to use Windows Live Writer instead of built-in web editor. No matter how good web editor is, desktop publishing is just too hard to beat, at least at the moment. I personally like WLW myself and use it whenever I can. But this is not the only choice you have on the desktop; another big one is MS Word 2007. I'm not an Office guru, but if you watch the video at the end of this post you can get ideas how easy and intuitive content creation can be when you have the right tool at your disposal. You can set it up with BlogEngine just as easy as WLW. Simply open new document and go to Publish/Blog in the office menu.
You'll get a new document loaded in the publishing workspace. Here, create your content the way you usually do in Word. You can use most of the features, including complex objects like graphs, charts, clip arts etc. This is the most appealing reason for using Word as your publishing platform; no other tool will give you same feature set to work with document. What pleasantly surprised me - it generates amazingly clean HTML code. Cleaner than WLW and so much cleaner than Word 2003 (which totally sucks in making HTML code). All objects will be conveniently converted into images when you hit "Publish", so that you can use Excel to feed a chart, select layout, format it nicely and it will be sent to the blog as standard image file. Sweet!
Once you done, click "Publish" button. If you don't yet have a blog setup, Word will launch simple wizard and collect information needed to access to your blog. Use "other" as you blog provider and then click "next".
Select "MetaWebLog" as blog's API and type in path to your blog followed by metaweblog.axd. This is not a real file, HttpHandler will intercept requests for this virtual page and send back everything client, in our case MS Word, needs to know to communicate with blog engine. Add user ID and password. In picture options, select "my blog provider". Check "remember password" so you don't have to type it every time you publish to the blog.
If all worked fine, you'll get confirmation that account has been created.
Now every time when you click "Publish" document will be sent to your blog. There is also draft option, set categories, you can open existing blog post for editing and other useful perks. All things considered, Word 2007 is excellent tool for desktop to web publishing. Unless your religion strictly forbid using any “M$” products, you definitely should try it.
