Windows Live Writer Makes Beautiful Blogs

Windows Live Writer 11 (free) fills a product niche I didn't know existed: Offline blog post production tool. The program is, in essence, a light word processor and design app you can use to write the contents of blog posts and make them pretty. Live Writer 11 comes bundled with the free Windows Live Essentials suite (though you can install Live Writer 11 by itself, skipping the seven other bundled apps and browser toolbar, if this is the only thing you want).
If you don't have a blog account with one of the popular free or paid blogging services, such as Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, or Microsoft's SharePoint, the program leads you to Wordpress.com to create an account. Once the body of the post is written, you can add some spit and polish: Embed photos or other images, lay-in videos, do some light styling of text, add hyperlinks, design and lay-in tables, preview the post, and correct any squiggle-underlined spelling mistakes before you submit your draft to the posting mechanism of whatever blog service you use.
The fact that Microsoft has partnered with Wordpress.com means the tool provides full functionality with that blogging platform, but tests showed it was quite capable of producing and uploading post drafts to other blogging services, such as TypePad. Every common feature or formatting option is available from the menu bar, and a post I first wrote and published into Wordpress was very easily migrated into TypePad. I just had to change the destination blog (yes, it supports multiple blog accounts) from a dropdown menu. The only feature that didn't appear to be available with the test TypePad account I used was the ability to publish the post from within Live Writer. In this case, I just uploaded the post draft to the service, then had to go to the administrative Web page for my blog on TypePad, and click a Publish button there. Other than that, Live Writer managed to do everything else on its own.
The tool also generates nice-looking photo gallery pages, and will even take care of the task of uploading the photos from your PC to your Windows Live account, if you have one. If you don't, and you plan to use the program, it may benefit you to create an account just for the simplicity it brings to the process. Other popular, free add-ons add various other features to the tool: One add-on sets up Live Writer 11 to post Tweets with shortlinks simultaneously as you publish the blog post, for example. There are dozens to choose from, all available from a Web page you reach by clicking a menu item in Live Writer 11.