As anyone who is familiar with the Hines57 sites will realize, we recently made a massive change to not only the look and feel, but also the underlying engine(s) and hosting. Part of this change was moving to WordPress for this blog.

I enjoy writing, and blogging comes somewhat natural to me, but the niceties of MS Office have ruined me. That is, I like cut and paste, I want images in my content and I want them in a certain place, the whitespace needs to make me happy.

Typically, this is somewhat difficult to do given a web interface, a text box, the need to upload images separately – yada, yada, yada. Enter Windows Live Writer.

First, I Googled “offline blog editor” and quickly realized that there were two major players, BlogDesk and Windows LiveWriter. Then I thought, “Hey, I need this to work with WordPress!” I went back and threw WordPress into the search, and was surprised to see that Windows Live Writer continued to come up! Having read about Windows Live Writer earlier this summer, I decided I’d go check it out.

Lo and Behold, it supports WordPress – and it supports it pretty dang good from my perspective. Seriously, I simply downloaded and installed it. Upon running, I provided the URL for my site, along with login credentials. Then I wrote a post, with an image in it, and hit submit.I cried that the Blog didn’t support images, but if I would provide an FTP directory along with credentials and subsequent URL, it would manage that for me. Which I promptly did – and POW! Things just worked! I know, the tool has the word Microsoft in front of it – you didn’t expect it to just work, did you. Frankly, neither did I – but it does.

After mentioning the tool to Tommy he decided to give it a whirl. He hit a few more bumps in the road than I did, but then he also appears to have attempted to click on more of the bells and whistles than I did. Ultimately, I must say, if you write for a blog and aren’t using an Offline Editor – you need to. If you are using an Offline Editor other than Windows Live Writer – you need to take a peak at Windows Live Writer, it’s just that nice.

I found the book itself to be quite well written. It begins by making no assumptions regarding your knowledge of JQuery (although it does assume you grok JScript) and starts with the most basic steps all the time pushing toward more powerful usages of the library.

With numerous real-world client-side issues addressed, you are bound to find a solution to 90% of your questions in the first few chapters. JQuery is also extensible, and many people out there are continually writing libraries on top of it.

This book dedicates the last few chapters to a review of some of the more common\popular libraries and assists you in understanding where you might leverage it in your projects.

All together, if you have never touched JQuery and are interested in learning something about it, this is a great book for you. If you already know a bit about the language, you are probably looking for something else though.

ISBN-13 #: 978-1-847192-50-9

Recommended?: Yes