Not that these things matter so much to me. I’m perfectly ok with writing posts directly in a browser. But I like it when there are better solutions.

As it took me almost an hour to refresh WordPress categories in Flock, I’ve taken this, my main blog, out of Flock. Too bad, though, as I have a kind of investment in this blog. Not that it’s likely that Flock will become my main editor but I did notice that I have a tendency to use my personal Blogspot blog more while I’m giving Flock a whirl.

I’m writing this in Windows Live Writer. Yesterday, it crashed miserably while I was simply switching blogs. As WLW is in beta, I wasn’t that surprised and I should have used this as an opportunity to help out the developers. But I kind of lost my patience with beta software. I used to love beta software and didn’t mind the occasional crash. But I need to improve my workflow and not be bogged down with bugged down software.

WLW does seem like a well-planned editor but I already see a few quirks. Like the fact that there’s no easy way to activate a “spell as you type” feature. I’m guessing the feature is there but it’s not very easy to find.

The categories menu for this blog doesn’t allow for direct addition of categories in the categories field. You can add categories by opening the list and adding categories from there. Makes sense for blogs which have reasonable numbers of categories but since WordPress.com blogs have categories serving as tags, it’d be useful to add categories directly. Of course, it’s easy to add Technorati tags and I’m guessing that commonly used tags are somehow kept in the interface. But I prefer to use WordPress categories as tags because they work as both links from WordPress.com and as actual Technorati tags.

But WLW has some cool features. Like the link glossary which seems to be relatively close to what I was wishful-thinking about yesterday. Actually, I quite like the “Insert Hyperlink” interface as it’s very elegant, it’s just a keystroke away (ctrl-k), it’s fully keyboard-operatable, it has access to previous posts on the author’s blogs (including entries posted by other authors on collaborative blogs), and it can add some link properties like XFN. Good job! Now, if I can just have access to my complete Web history and favourites using some kind of cross-platform synchronisation mechanism à la Google Browser Sync, I’m happy.

WLW also has some neat features like blog stats and comments. This might explain why so many WordPress.com bloggers use it as their main blog editor.

We’ll see how this goes.