The Kirks

Windows Live Writer is still looking pretty good.   The picture below is added using Windows Live Writer and I think it’ll upload fine.  Note that the text wrapping

around the picture is fairly good and you can adjust the margins to make it look even better.  I suspect that there will be some irritations with Live Writer which will involve how it interacts with the Wordpress blog but I can probably live with that. 

One thing that’s slightly irritating is when you want to add a hyperlink to the post when you’re off line.  Of course, this isn’t the fault of Live Writer.  If you know the URL or it’s in your history then you can paste it in but otherwise if you really want a link to some web site then it’s probably best to put in a tag and wait until just before you publish on-line to update it. 

The program is really easy to use although it’s a bit of a mistake to put the help for an offline blogging program on line.

Let’s try a table.

Well that’s easy.  Maps, pictures, tables, links, tags.  Everything you really need. 

I’ve been trying to work out what the “blog this” stuff does.  There’s a button on IE7.0 in the Tools menu which allows you to blog a web link pretty quickly.  Obviously this is an on line tool but it’s easy to use.

I’ve now added a really big picture with a link through to the original.  The first thing to do is to see whether or not the editing on the picture is done on the original, a copy or just the thumbnail which is included in the blog post.  I would hope that the editing is done throughout but on a local copy.  It looks like it’s a local copy because the offline post file on my local hard drive is 5.24mb which sort of has to include the original.   The watermarking is good but the various effects (here it’s sepia and emboss) are a bit cheesy.  It looks like one of those pictures on the front of the Wall Street Journal.  It’s kind of nice to have the linking all done correctly though and it does make for a simple way of adding pictures and tables and maps.  I can’t get the text.  Here’s a quote

George Bush said “argle fargle bargle” when he was looking at The Kirks Blog.  Mr Bush’s press spokesman later said that the President was “feeling poorly”.  He also asked whether or not it was possible to put a block quote inside a quote.  It isn’t.

And so a quote has appeared.   Nice.