I listen to several tech podcasts: CNet’s Buzz Out Loud (the boys and I think Molly Wood is a scream!), This Week in Tech, This Week in Google and Windows Weekly among others.
The Windows Weekly has been very helpful; based on Paul Thurrrott’s unabashed love of his Windows Home Server I ended up buying one and fell in love with it myself. For less than $300 I picked up a refurbed (roxors!) HP MediaSmart Home Server with a 750gb hard drive. Now that we have five computers in the house the home server has been the a life saver for backing up all the machines. I don’t really use it much for media sharing but I have set it up to collect music and pictures from all the machines.
Recently Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott discussed the newly released Microsoft Essentials. With the exception of the Windows Movie Maker I have no use for the programs bundled in the Essentials package. Paul waxed poetic about Windows Live Writer; he uses it to write his many blog posts.
Let’s admit it: Blogger sucks as far as it’s interface for composing posts. A long time ago I started using the ScribeFire add-on to Firefox. One of the reasons I gave up on Chrome was how horrible ScribeFire was in Chrome – well, that among other reasons. Recent updates to ScribeFire have left me less than dazzled by the program but it was significantly better than Blogger.
I was more than ready to give Live Writer a try. After setting it up I spewed out a post. I was more than delighted to see that it pulled in my Style Sheet in perfect detail. Everything about my post was exactly as it would appear once posted unlike any other posting program I have tried. It offers all the expected options: links, photos, videos, and the usual formatting stuff. Spell checking and word count are also very handy.
You can publish to multiple blogs and numerous blogging protocols are supported. I’m not usually a Windows fangirl but this little freebee has really impressed me. If you have a blog, particularly a Blogger blog, you should give it a try.
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