The Problem

I maintain a WordPress blog and when creating blog posts I often use images from the clipboard. I have usually generated these by using the wonderful tool Snagit.

I found the provided WordPress editor a little tricky to work with in two respects:

• Pasting images from a clipboard seems to be a cumbersome process.
• As it is an online editor any slight delay in web refreshing is quite annoying and has sometimes led to lost edits.

So, I wanted to find a blog editor that allowed pasting of clipboard images and was not web based. And I also needed spell checking.

The Solution

There are many lists on the web which list such tools.

There are three tools that allow paste from the clipboard

• Windows Live Writer – This allowed easy paste from the clipboard and spell checking.
• BlogDesk – I haven’t tested this
• Microsoft Word– I’ve tried it and it works! Image pasting is easy and of course you get a spell checker.  If you go this route you can always use WordPress or other tools to tidy up the post.

Windows Live Writer is the most polished product and gets my vote. It also has more blog specific facilities than Microsoft Word.

Problems with Windows Live Writer

There are however a few problems with Windows Live Writer:

• Using the product creates multiple hits to your blog and so can screw up your statistics.
• Whilst you can add tags, you cannot retrieveve existing tags for a post.

Alternatives

In researching a suitable product I came across these alternatives. I’ve added my own entirely unscientific comments…