Open Live Writer: Goldilocks and the Three Bears
This blog has been in existence for some 19 years. For most of that time the various posts have been written in Open Live Writer. OLW is the open source successor to Windows Live Writer, which was a free Microsoft app. Last time I wrote about it was ten years ago when the Dot Net Foundation assumed the project and cast it into open source. As in many things, I am anomalous. I still use it routinely.
I was reminded of how anomalous I am when I recently had a problem posting to my site. This has happened periodically. Lightningbase, my long-time host, has various protections in place to keep people from doing nefarious things with the XML-RPC process that OLW relies upon to access WordPress. Occasionally, I have to ask them to tweak the host protections to allow me continued access from OLW.
On that basis, I gather very few people still use OLW. Curious about this, I posted to the WordPress subreddit about my use of OLW asking if I was the last person still using the app. That question met with silence. Mostly. The one or two to replied, noting that was a name they’d not heard in a long time. One mimetically.
I still find there’s a lot to like about OLW. It’s lightweight. Simple. Built to a task. It doesn’t generate the kind of cruft that I got from Word.
It allows me to insert images and links with ease. I especially like the mechanism for auto-linking phrases to URLs. I have quite a library of links accumulated. This has proven profoundly useful of the years.
It has the ability to preview posts using the style of the site. It’s frail. It caused more problems than it was worth, so I don’t use it.
Guttenberg is a Block Head
When the Guttenberg editor was released to much fanfare a decade ago, I gave it a try. While it had some appeal, I found it unworkable as a tool for writing. It seemed to mostly address the task of page layout. It made writing a disjoined affair.
In the realm of print, I can certainly write in Adobe InDesign, but much of the app is unnecessary in that role. To its credit, the unnecessary bits mostly stay out of the way. At least for short-form writing.
In Guttenberg, the basic text block tool has proven offensive. The default text block has a nasty habit of moving the window around based upon simple cursor manipulations. If you are writing, so always at the end of the document, and the page view constantly keeps shifting, it’s very aggravating.
I guess I just dislike writing in the browser. This is one of the reasons I don’t make much use of GMail. Browsers misbehave. And I like to write and edit offline. This is why I almost always write offline in OLW, posting a draft to the site for finishing online.
At one time, I had to keep the Classic Editor plugin installed to the site. These days, I don’t bother. The Guttenberg editor now has functions that let me convert a post to blocks or edit in classic mode. This is enough for my needs.
Close
Sometimes the old ways are the best ways. Open Live Writer is like the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It’s not too much, nor too little. It’s just right. At least for me.