Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to create gripping blog posts. Live Writer has lot of features that gives a better blog experiences such as WYSWIG authoring, Photo Publishing, Map publishing, Video embedding etc. Windows Live Writer is free and can be downloaded from http://windowslive.com/Desktop/Writer .

Live Writer supports posting to popular blogging sites such as Live Spaces, Blogger, WordPress etc. Live Writer also supports posting to SharePoint blog site. Rest of this blog explains the process of setting up Live Writer to post to a SharePoint blog site.

1. The first step is to add blog account to SharePoint blog from Live Writer. Click Blogs – Add blog account from the writer menu bar.

2. This would open a popup prompting to select the blog service to be used.

3. Select SharePoint blog and click Next button.

4. The next screen would prompt for the SharePoint blog URL. Enter the URL of your blog(for ex. http://MySite/Myblogsite and click Next)

5. Live Writer would configure blog settings and take you to blog post creation page.

6. Enter post title and content.

7. You can also add photos, links, videos etc to your blog post

8. Once you are satisfied with the content and styling of photos click publish button on the tool bar to post the blog to the SharePoint blog website.

9. That’s it your blog will be posted to the SharePoint blog site.

10. The photos within the blog post will be stored internally as attachments to the SharePoint blog list item.