About a year ago, Microsoft Program Manager on Azure and long-time blogger Scott Hanselman announced that he was working on open-sourcing the once popular blogging editor Windows Live Writer. The program, which was once a part of the Windows Live suite of services (but kind of disappeared when Microsoft shuttered Windows Live in favor of Metro/Modern/Windows apps) gave bloggers a WYSIWYG way of creating blog posts, allowing creators to quickly lay out a blog post complete with images, edit the underlying HTML, and work offline on blog posts and then upload them using the XML-RPC protocol.
Hanselman has been hinting that his open-sourcing project has been progressing:
In meeting #5 about Windows Live Writer #opensource. Remember this? Go RT a few more times 😉 https://t.co/9vS7r4wAXr
— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) February 4, 2015
and in a tweet reply to blogger Ed Bott today, announced that a new version of Windows Live Writer could be coming “soon”.
Microsoft at one time had high hopes for personal blogging (remember Spaces?), but that quickly receded as the likes of Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr became far more popular and easier to master methods of communication. Still, Windows Live Writer filled a niche that hasn’t been equaled by any other program. Microsoft has tried to incorporate blog creation into Word with limited success (there’s no HTML editor and Word is notorious for mucking up HTML, even to this day), although there may be a bit of hope with the recently released WordPress – OneNote connection.
Aside from inducing twinges of nostalgia, bringing back Windows Live Writer could make blog post creation and editing just a bit easier for some of us, anyway, and we’re looking forward to seeing what Scott has up his sleeve.
