Always on the lookout for a better way to blog from Windows (BlogJet is barely functional and ecto for Windows is still too buggy), I was mildly curious when I saw that a new application, Windows Live Writer was out today.

I figure, it’s free…why not?

When you hear that a blog editor is “WYSIWYG,” you think that means that bold text will show as bold and italics will show as italics. Links will be underlined. Bulleted lists will have real dots instead of <ul>s and <li>s.

No, Microsoft Live Writer does it one better…it takes the actual style sheet of your blog and shows you what your post will look like as you type. I have yet to see any other editor do this…extremely cool…

Good thing is that I’m seeing this in the exact same typeface and color that’s in my style sheet. Bad news is that it’s not picking up any images in the style sheet so no flower bullets or accents while I type. I orginally had url(/site/relative/path.jpg) in the CSS, and even changing it to url(http://www.momathome.com/site/relative/path.jpg) didn’t help. I’ll report it.

Other than that (and the fact that I can’t set an image upload path), it’s a really nice blogging tool. Supports categories, trackbacks, future-posting, pings. All the basics.

Interesting that there is a SDK (software developer’s kit) so enterprising folks can write plug-ins to work with this.

Okay…let’s see how it posts…