Right at the end of May, Microsoft released a Beta 2 of Windows Live Writer and ever since then it's been in my queue to write about, given that it is now the offline editor I use for almost all my blogging. However, I think I'll give up on writing the massive comprehensive review I was intending to do and instead write a series of smaller posts about various aspects of the program.
So first up, I thought I'd mention the new capability to easily link to previous posts. When you choose "Insert-> Hyperlink..." (or simply "Ctrl+K", which brings back old WordStar memories) you get the dialog box shown on the left (click for larger image) that allows you to enter the URL to link to and potentially edit the link text. The cool part, though, is the "Link to" dropdown button which has as one of the two choices "Previous Posts". If you choose that, you then see the dialog box shown on the right (click for larger image).
In this window you see the recent posts you have made across all the blogs for which you use Windows Live Writer. You can simply click on one of them and the link is automagically inserted for you. Alternatively you can click on a blog title to see the posts to that specific blog. (The posts are retrieved from the blog itself so it does not matter whether they were written using WLW or through your blog web interface.) If you want to go back in time, you don't have an option to go back to a specific date (which my previous editor, Semagic, did) but you can see the last n posts, where n is 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 100 or 500 and so you can scroll back that way.
All in all it's pretty slick and has saved me already a great amount of time in linking to previous entries. Given that I blog across multiple weblogs, the ability to link to entries in other blogs is definitely a great timesaver. (Note that you need to have setup all the weblogs within WLW, which I have done for mine.)
If you haven't checked it out (and are on Windows), do go to the Windows Live Writer Zone and download a copy. I think you might be impressed as to how well it can help you blog faster.
