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Windows only 
My favorite blogging software has always been Windows Live Writer because of the tremendous job Microsoft has done maintaining and adding more and more useful features to it. The interface is nice, inline spell checking catches mistakes as I make them, and the overall experience is very positive.
I’ve tried out a lot of other blogging applications (both paid and free), and none have come close to all the features Windows Live Writer has to offer. There’s one alternative, however, that’s almost there: Zoundry Raven. It supports nearly all blogging platforms, will let you preview posts just as they would appear on your blog, and much more:
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Tabbed WYSIWYG Editing
- True WYSIWYG writing and XHTML source editing
- Drag and drop images, video, and text from the Web
- Unicode (UTF-8) support
- Preview posts in your blog’s template
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Improved content management
- Built-in indexer allows you to see posts by blogs, links, tags, and images
- View tag cloud and browse to posts containing specific tags
- View posts independently of where they were published
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Manage multiple media storage services
- Set up different media services (Picasa, Image Shack, Ripway, custom FTP) for different blogs
- Share single media service with multiple blogs
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Manage multiple blogs offline
- Publish and update the same post to multiple blogs
- Manage multiple blogs within multiple accounts
- Now supports extended entries
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Raven2Go
- Install Raven as a Portable Application on your flash/thumb drive
- Raven will stay out of your Windows registry and let you take your blogging on the road
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WordPress 2.2+ Page & Tag support
- Use Raven to create and modify your WordPress Pages just like any other blog post
- Set WordPress tags as well as import tags from all of your posts
I’d say that Zoundry Raven is almost on par with Windows Live Writer. It did have troubles importing the template for one of my blogs, and the spell checking is on-demand instead of inline, but overall I’d say this has a chance of becoming a popular blogging tool.
Get Zoundry Raven for Windows
Thanks Jason!
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Tags: Freeware, Software, Windows, Applications, Features, How To
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I normally use the text editor that comes with Flock Social Browser. It has most of the features you mentioned, plus it’s embedded in the browser. It’s very functional and user friendly.
If you use Flock, you will understand why this blogging tool is very convenient.
Is it supporting plug-in? There are 2 plug-ins that I use frequently in Live Writer: screen capture & zemanta.
From a simplicity point I’d say it is nice, but there are just a lot of things Flock isn’t capable of handling when blogging.
Thanks for the proposition! I’ll try it!
The standards from the html editors are high so we want more and more…