Write blog posts with Live Writer

One of the best tools supplied in the Windows Live Suite is Live Writer, a blog editor. It offers all the ease of writing a document in Word, such as real-time spellchecking, and there's no easier way of adding images to a blog post. In this video we'll show how to get started with a blogging account with Wordpress, but you can also use Live Writer with Windows Live Spaces, Blogger and Typepad, or a blog on your own website.

We're assuming that you have installed the Live software, if not take a look at our Live sign-up video to find out how to do this.

Start Windows Live Writer and it should prompt you to create an account. If it doesn't, click on the Tools menu and Options. Click on Accounts on the left-hand side and then on the Add button. Click on the appropriate option; in our case this will be Other blog service. Click on Next.

Enter the address of the blog and your username and password. Select the Remember my password option if no one else has access to you computer as this will save time later on. Click on Next.

Live Writer will connect to the blog and get the rest of the settings it needs from there.

Give the blog a nickname. This is useful if you want to edit more than one blog from the same computer. Click on Finish and then on OK.

The Live Writer window will now show the editing window and you will see that it has taken the formatting from the live site.

Click and type in the top box to give the post a title, then click in the main part of the window to start typing. Use the icons in the right-hand panel to insert pictures and links. It's worth just showing how useful the image insert tool is. Click on the Picture link and then find the picture you want to include. Or you can copy and paste the image directly into the blog post.

The picture is selected automatically and you can adjust the size by clicking and dragging on the squares around the edge.

By default the images are set as inline so no text appears either side. Click on the down arrow to select left, right or centred positioning. Adding a margin also helps to prevent text from being obscured.

Click on the Publish icon in the toolbar when you are happy with your post and it will be sent to your blog.