If you haven't heard of Windows Live Writer you have been missing out on something amazing. This brilliant piece of free software from
Microsoft is the most powerful blogging tool I have used. It is very special because it allows you to publish to blogs without having to login a browser and provides a desktop experience that a browser cannot provide, such as picture cropping and lots of other effects. It also will work with all of the popular blog platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, BLOG ENGINE .NET, dasBlog, Moveable and Windows Live blogs. The best part of the software are the plug-ins that you can get for it. There are hundreds of them and they can be downloaded from
www.gallery.live.com. These plug-ins seriously enhance your blog and can save you a lot of time. Here are my favourite 8 which you can download from Tech Ticker direct.
Insert Silverlight App Plug-in. This useful little tool allows you to very easily and quickly add a Silverlight application to a blog post. It generates the embed code for you so all you have to do is enter the URL, size colour and Silverlight version number. - Notify del.ic.ous – This little plugin will automatically submit the details of your blog post to del.ic.ous with the date name and other useful meta data. All you have to have is an account and then enable it in WLWs options menu.
Paste as Visual Studio - Paste code copied from the Visual Studio editor while preserving syntax highlighting, indentation and background colour. Options: Max Height, Title Block, Alternating Lines, Line Numbers, Wrap Lines, Un-indent, Background Colour, Class Names. 
Twitter notify – This plugin created by Microsoft send the details of your blog post to your Twitter account. The app asks you each time when you publish a post so that you enter the Twitter message which is generated with a bit.ly URL. - Digg this – Another plugin by Microsoft that automatically adds a DiggThis badge to your blog post after you publish it from Writer. The badge can be customised and works on all types of platform.
- Visual Studio solution uploader - The plugin allows you to select a Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010 solution file, when selected the solution and the directory will be zipped and included in the blog post. All done in a few simple steps. You can even get it to build binaries of the solution.
- Wikipedia link - Allows you to highlight some text and turn it into a Wikipedia link
Google AdSense code - Now you can add any Google adsense adverts in your blog without having to copy and paste code into the HTML view.
