Windows Live Writer, for those that did not know, is part of Microsoft’s Windows Live range of products (retired in 2012). These products include Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Mail. Windows Live Writer was developed and released by Microsoft back in 2006 and is a desktop blog-publishing software that lets you write and publish your content to platforms like WordPress and Blogger.
“Windows Live Writer makes it easy to share your photos and videos on almost any blog service. With Writer, you can preview everything you’re adding to your blog, and see exactly how the fonts, spacing, colors, and images will look, before you publish. It’s fast and easy to make photos and videos look great on your blog. You can even create a photo album – just select the style you want and Writer takes care of the rest. Writer is already packed with useful features, but if you like to tinker, there are all sorts of plug-ins you can add to help you do even more,” the software description page reads.
There are actually quite a bit of people who still utilize Windows Live Writer to publish content to WordPress, even though this software has been set aside for quite some time now. If you are one of them, you will be happy to know that there are internal discussions about making Windows Live Writer open source. This means members of the community and those who love the software can actually help improve it.
“That would mean the possibility would exist to not only update and improve WLW itself but also see it turned into a modern app for all Windows 8/8.1 devices including Surface and Surface 2 which cannot run the current version. That also means the plugin community could return and really build extensibility into the app along the same lines that plugin authors do for WordPress, one of the main platforms that WLW lets you connect with,” Richard Hay states on his website. Richard brought this matter to our attention earlier today.
I’m in a meeting right now talking about a possible future for Windows Live Writer. I think 20k RTs of this would help.
— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) June 12, 2014
So what can you do to help out? All you have to do is retweet the above tweet from Scott Hanselman, a member of the Microsoft Web Platform Team. As you can see, he has achieved over 1K retweets, and is shooting for at least 20K. Whether or not he reaches his desired retweets is one thing, but the amount of love the idea of open sourcing Windows Live Writer has received shows just how much people love the software.
For the sake of those who enjoy the software, let’s hope Microsoft does open source it! If you are not familiar with Windows Live Writer, check out the video below showcasing the software in action.
