I've tried several blogging clients before and when I got to use Windows Live Writer for the first time, I never turned to another client ever again. It had everything that I needed and more. Here are some of the reasons why I love using it to suite my blogging needs.

Interface

What's so unique about is, is that it provides me a preview of my blog template so I know exactly what my blogpost will look like even before I post it. I could see if my pictures are all aligned with the blog template or if they're a little off-margin. You also have the option to view the source code of your post if you want to do a little tweaking. The interface is styled like a normal word processor but much more specially tuned for blogging. You can choose the color theme template of WLW according to your taste. There's no limit to the number of blogs you can associate Writer with. Just follow the wizard in setting up your blog and Writer will automatically detect your blog settings and you have the option to allow automatic log-in.

Picture Formatting

Another thing that I love about the writer is the picture formatting options. You can choose to have several effects to add some pizzas to the pictures in your post. My favorite by far is the photopaper and drop shadow effect. You can also crop the pictures within Writer itself and even put a watermark. Sometimes cropping can become tricky though because the pictures can get re-sized with a very odd ratio, making them somewhat distorted. I think this is the bug that the developers have to fix.

Plug-ins

You can also download several plug-ins to use with Writer. This makes posting so much more interesting. Here's an overview of the ones I have so far. Word Count is a plug-in that provides me the word count in my post, this is useful especially if I have to post something worth 100 words or more. I use Cool Emotion to add cute little emoticons in my posts. They have 13 pages of emoticon styles to choose from, some are animated and some are not. This is not really necessary but I find it's nice to jazz up the posts. Another is the Digg plug-in. This is for my users who have Digg accounts. You can browse hundreds of user-generated plug-ins at the Window Live Gallery download page. Be careful though, make sure to read user-reviews first before installing them. Sometimes some of the plug-ins have already been incorporated into the latest version or isn't compatible anymore.

Tags and Categories

You can also automatically add tags and categories into your posts that will automatically be synced to your blog settings. You can check any number of categories for your posts to be filed into.

Scheduled Posts & Editing

The little drop down calendar button at the bottom left corner lets you input what time and on what date your post will be published. For quick editing, you can choose to open and retrieve posts from your blog from within Writer itself. It preserves the original formatting you did before, which saves you a lot of time. I found it especially irritating if I used Blogspot's post editor and some of the post margins have been re-aligned. Writer eliminates this problem.

Download the latest version of Windows Live Writer.