Seaport and Windows Live Writer

Publishing a blog is a great way to attract more traffic for your business, or as a way to earn money writing websites. However, writing a blog takes more than just cranking out high quality posts and articles. The website has to be setup, blog software installed, and then, posts have to be written, formatted, and uploaded to the website.

If the thought of coding HTML, using FTP to upload files, and sorting through PHP scripts and server-side scripts sounds like a one-way trip to boredom town, there is another way. 

Microsoft's Windows Live Writer is a free tool used to write blog posts. Live Writer's features list is impressive.

It is a WYSIWIG blog editor that allows for not only text editing on the fly, but also the ability to insert pictures and other formatting into the post using a familiar icon based user interface. Additionally, Live Writer can also be used to set the category the post will belong to as well as setting both internal tags, as well as the ability to add external tagging, such as Technorati tags.

Basic image editing and resizing is also available from inside of Windows Live Writer. Furthermore, posts can be scheduled to be published later at some future date from within Live Writer. Other data such as the author, and whether or not comments or pingbacks are allowed for the post can be set as well.

Reviews for Windows Live Writer have been generally positive. However, Live Writer is not without its drawbacks, and a couple of very big cons weighing against its pros.

Live Writer's biggest strength is its ability to handle virtually all of a blog post's formatting without the need to use any HTML code. However, Windows Live Writer, or WLW, does allow for directly editing the source code with a simple tabbed interface that switches the editor between WYSIWIG text editing and linking, and HTML edits.

WLW supports multiple blogging platforms including industry leader WordPress and Google's Blogger platform. Naturally, Live Writer supports Microsoft's Live Spaces and Live Blogs as well.

Windows Live Writer is a free tool from Microsoft and can be downloaded separately or as part of the Windows Live Essentials package.

The main Live Writer con is that it installs a handful of crapware by default and even a couple of services and application plug-ins without notifying the user except deep within the lengthy user agreement. Worse, is that the user has no options for not installing these applications and services.

For example, many users were afraid they caught a virus after downloading a Live Writer update that also installed something called seaport or seaport.exe. Not only was seaport installed without any user acknwoledgement it was also activated, and set to Automatic Startup. Meaning that the unwanted seaport.exe service was not only taking up disk space, but was also using up memory 24 hours a day regardless of whether or not the user wanted or used the service.

The only way a user would ever know this software had been slipped onto their hard drive and run at startup was if they paid careful attention to the running processes. Once detected, worried users frantacly searched for ways to remove seaport.exe permanently from their systems, only to find that it could be installed again later if WLW was updated again.

Other users noticed the additional installation of the Office Live plug-in on their systems. Still other users complained about the bundling of other Windows Live products when they just wanted to install Live Writer, although these products can be avoided by paying careful attention to the check boxes options during installation.

In all, as long as users are careful enough to avoid or remove the unwanted bloatware from Microsoft included with WLW, it is a useful utility that most bloggers will find very useful.