Succumbed. I'm a Live Writer Junky.
OK, I admit it. I've been suckered into using this thing permanently now :) It's easier than waiting for the web page to load, run quickly, publishes quickly, and it's simple to use.
The main point to my post though is plugins. I haven't hunted for heaps of plugins yet, but I have got one that helps me a lot. I always used to tag each of my posts with what song I was listening to, but I stopped being bothered. Now I can use plugins to do it for me :) This one from jtsquared is working great (and supports Winamp :). While at his site, grab his LiveWriterTray app too. It's a systray app that let's you launch the Live Writer easily.
But it's the plugin model that I'm mostly dealing with. The plugin model is pretty good and easy to write against, but it's fairly limited in what you can do. It's specifically built around adding specific custom content to a blog post - which isn't what I want to do...sort of.
In my blog I've added an admin feature (when using the web based post editor) to upload files while you're writing a post. I want to emulate this as a plugin. The thing here is that I don't necessarily want to create 'content' after I've uploaded any given file (although I might for some) and I want to upload more things than just images (so I can't just let Writer use the newMediaObject API when I publish - I cant' embed a zip file, can I?
But I want to call the newMediaObject method on my blog from the plugin. While I could probably get this to work, Writer already knows how. I examined a few of the assemblies that came with Writer in Reflector, and everything I need is right there. In WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.dll I can instantiate and use the WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.MetaweblogClient object and call the newMediaObject method on that - but first what I really want is the current instance that Writer has instantiated to call it. I shouldn't have to instantiate my own instance, especially since it needs to know the urlt o the Metaweblog service and your username and password to authenticate against.
So I've gone through all their other code, and it's all there for me - I just need to get a handle on it so I can use it :) My next step now is to try and get in contact with the Writer guys and see if I can get them to extend the plugin model for me.
[Now Playing: Over Now - Alice In Chains]