8 Excellent Extensions to Further Expand Your Windows Live Writer

Fol­low­ing up my rec­om­men­da­tion post on Win­dows Live Writer, I promised to deliver with some of the best exten­sions (or plu­g­ins) that are avail­able for WLW. Hence, I’ve spent the last week or so, research­ing the depths of the WLW Plu­gin archives (7 pages); in search of the most use­ful add-ons and I found cou­ple of absolute gems!

After read­ing the com­ments, from the ini­tial WLW post – it was clear that many peo­ple hadn’t either heard of it or have heard of it but can’t (or won’t) use it. That came a bit of a sur­prise to me because I thought more peo­ple would have known about Win­dows Live prod­ucts and they had soft­ware ver­sions for other Oper­at­ing Sys­tems (i.e. Macs).

How­ever, that was not the case to be. Since then, I hope more of us have started using the pro­gram (or at least given it a shot). For those of us that do use the tool, I would like to share some use­ful plu­g­ins avail­able for Win­dows Live Writer. (Maybe, you might be con­vinced to use the pro­gram after see­ing some of these tools!) With­out much fur­ther ado, let’s get straight into the plu­g­ins itself;

8 WLW Extensions

Blog This for Firefox

> Down­load Blog This for Fire­fox allows you to directly import a page’s con­tent on to your WLW Edi­tor. I know of many blog­gers that take ideas of other peo­ple and rewrite them in their per­spec­tive, and for those; this plu­gin is bril­liant. Just make sure that you express your opin­ion in your own words and avoid any copy­right infringement.

Insert Code for WLW

> Down­load Insert Code for WLW will allow you to add code from a range of widely used lan­guages such as; C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Using the nor­mal source edi­tor will work most times, but when work­ing with more com­plex codes; it some­times do some really weird things… Hence the use­ful­ness of this plugin!

Twit­ter Notify

> Down­load Just like the count­less num­ber of “auto­mat­i­cally tweetin’ tools” out there; this plu­gin will add that func­tion­al­ity to your WLW. It will auto­mat­i­cally send a tweet, using the account of your choice – announc­ing your pub­lished post. I haven’t used it yet, but seems pretty straight-forward and handy.

Word Count

> Down­load Quite sur­pris­ingly, WLW doesn’t have a run­ning total on the num­ber of words per arti­cle. That was pretty annoy­ing but luck­ily this plu­gin fills in on that mis­take. Sim­i­lar to the “word count” fea­ture found on Microsoft Word and other alter­na­tives; Word Count cal­cu­lates the num­ber of words, char­ac­ters and even spaces!

Bul­lets Plu­gin for WLW

> Down­load Win­dows Live Writer auto­mat­i­cally syn­chro­nizes its edi­tor with the theme of your blog, includ­ing your bul­lets. This is a really use­ful fea­ture to main­tain that flow within your blog, but more impor­tantly within your posts. How­ever, we all need to spice things up every now and then – this plu­gin adds heaps more vari­ety to your bulletin-options.

Dig­gThis

> Down­load Dig­gThis for Win­dows Live Writer adds a very small, but well-design “Digg But­ton” onto all of your posts. This one is optional, espe­cially if you already have WP-Plugins such as Socia­ble or other alter­na­tive Digg buttons.

How­ever, for those of us that want a quick solu­tion to adding a Digg but­ton – this is the way to go.

Adsense Code Drop In

> Down­load I’ve always found it hard to add Google Adsense codes into my WP-Blogs. Not par­tic­u­larly for Blo­gus­sion (because we don’t imple­ment any adver­tis­ing) but with my pre­vi­ous blogs; it just don’t work some­times. Hope­fully, this plu­gin will make it eas­ier for blog­gers to insert Adsense codes with­out too much hassle!

Sharper Photo

> Down­load Some­times, you just want to quick edit a photo and there’s no point open­ing an appli­ca­tion such as Pho­to­shop or some­thing sim­i­lar. Per­haps a quick crop, or a resize – Sharper Photo will allow you to do that. WLW does have a pretty decent image-editor on-board; but extra fea­tures are always welcomed!

Don’t Worry, There’s More!

These are just 8 plu­g­ins from about a pool of at least 150 WLW-supported exten­sions. You can find more that suit your per­sonal needs over at the WLW Plu­gin Archives. If you do find one that is use­ful, but haven’t been men­tioned in this thread – please let us know in the com­ments below!

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