At one point, blogging was changing the world. Politics, household economics, technology; you name it, there was someone writing a blog about it. Blogging was the great democratization of opinion, where anyone could set up a place to spout their own unique form of drivel, and hope that the masses would come.

Of course, most blogs didn’t get that many regular readers, and most couldn’t make any money – so the fad declined somewhat, with only the well-read (and generally well-written) or the persistent loonies sticking around. Tools used are/were largely web-based blog editing and authoring tools.

Even though there are still plenty of proponents out there, some say that the blog is basically dead. Popular content reporting site Technorati ditched their blog ranking report, and many other influential sources have flocked to Twitter/Instagram/Facebook etc as a way of getting noticed.

Blogging software

Windows Live Essentials is/was a package of software that added capabilities to Windows, including a really neat blog post composer called Windows Live Writer. WLW was well received at the time and gathered a legion of fans as it offered offline blog writing capabilities, as well as an easy way of posting images & other content into blog posts, without the aggro of uploading the pics to some staging area and then linking to them.

Development of WLW pretty much ceased after the 2012 release, and after a couple of glitches caused by supported blog services changing the way they authenticate users (which broke the publishing process), the decision was taken to fork the WLW codebase and spin out an open-source variant called Open Live Writer.

There aren’t many visible differences between OLW and WLW yet, apart from the former now supporting Google’s Blogger.com platform. Keep an eye on openlivewriter.org if you’re an active blogger, as the web’s best offline blogging tool looks to be getting a new lease of life.