Upgraded to Windows Live Writer beta2
The purpose of this post is to try out the latest beta of Microsoft’s “Windows Live Writer”. I’ve been very happy blogging with beta1 of WLW. At the same time, I will admit to a couple small annoyances and one big one - embedded images. 
In WLW-b1, I would add a nice small [file size] JPG file and it would end up being 3 times bigger when I looked at the file that was uploaded. My only recourse was to FTP to my blog, download the new files open/save using my image editor to get the files back down to a reasonable size, and then upload them again.
WLW also was missing a couple of real basic blogging features. The most common one noted in the forums was the ability to insert a slit/more/break in the post.
I worked around this and the need to dynamically add categories. I hacked my XMLRPC interface to interpret a few extra markups. Those “enhancements” have serviced me well.
The latest beta of WLW eliminated the need for one of those hacks - with the addition of the “spilt” command. (Update: WLW’s implementation of “split” is a bit harsh. If you place the slit in the middle of a paragraph, it breaks it into two. Further, when the whole blog entry is viewed, it still have a break where the “split” was inserted. Fortunately, my hack still works.)
While it appears there are no image controls, the good news is that images are not getting bigger. That will save me a lot of manual effort with my posts !
