If I asked you what your favorite blogging tool is many of you who follow this site would respond without hesitation – Windows Live Writer aka WLW for short.
In fact, I am using WLW right now to write this blog post and it is what I have used to write 99.9% of the over 4800 blog posts I have posted here at WindowsObserver.com.
WLW is part of Microsoft’s Windows Essentials which consists of Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Mail, Microsoft One Drive and of course WLW.
With the exception of Windows Mail I use everyone of those software programs on a daily basis.
All of the programs, minus OneDrive, all carry a 2012 tag behind the programs name since that was the year the last major updates were released for them.
There have been some minor updates between then and now but nothing significant.
A very significant concern of WLW users is that the program would eventually become unusable and stop working with the various services it can connect to such as WordPress, SharePoint, Blogger, TypePad and others.
Then there was also the once thriving add-in developer community that built simple plugins that would enhance WLW’s functionality but back in 2010 that repository of tools was shut down.
All that now remains of that collection is a single Windows Essentials Plug-ins page but it has no WLW plugins on it.
So as you can imagine these signs were troubling for the WLW faithful and honestly I think many were just waiting for the other shoe to drop and see the program pulled from existence.
Well hope springs eternal they say and this week there may be reason to hope that WLW will possibly get a second life and see new development happening for the blogging tool.
Yesterday everyone’s favorite evangelist from the Microsoft Web Platform Team, Scott Hanselman, gave the WLW faithful that reason to hope.
I’m in a meeting right now talking about a possible future for Windows Live Writer. I think 20k RTs of this would help.
— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) June 12, 2014
As of today the post has received nearly 1,000 RT’s and Favorited 65 times. Well short of the 20,000 RT’s Scott asked for but just go in and read some of the comments to find how well loved this piece of software is.
Later on in the sequence of replies to his initial tweet Scott revealed that there is an effort to actually open source the software:
@DerFredo they made it, but we are trying to open source it. It’s a blog editor. It talks to WordPress, etc.
— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) June 13, 2014
Can you imagine if this happens. That would mean the possibility would exist to not only update and improve WLW itself but also see it turned into a modern app for all Windows 8/8.1 devices including Surface and Surface 2 which cannot run the current version.
That also means the plugin community could return and really build extensibility into the app along the same lines that plugin authors do for WordPress, one of the main platforms that WLW lets you connect with.
So if you are a fan of Windows Live Writer head over to Twitter and retweet Scott’s initial tweet about WLW so that count can get up there and it can help him show folks at Microsoft how well liked and used this piece of software is.