This new year I plan on blogging more.   For one reason, it is a good stress relief.   The other reasons revolve that I like to do it.    

To make the process easier I plan on utilizing Windows live writer.  The reason for using live writer is the simple ease of use and great layout functions it allows.   I currently use WordPress as my blog engine.  It is fantastic and I can’t say enough about this blog engine.  However, I find that writing in the small text window is difficult when attempting to add  a lot of content.  

Live Writer is basically a scaled down word processor.   It works seamlessly with WordPress and give you the ability to do offline writing.   I have used it in the past but did not make blogging that much of a priority. 

Here is a great overview of live writer from PCworld

http://www.pcworld.com/article/211388/windows_live_writer_makes_beautiful_blogseven_when_youre_offline.html

In more recent weeks I have noticed a trend of blogs to start using livewriter as the editor.  You can see the increase from builtwith.com trends

See this chart of how it has increased usage.

I typically use google webmaster tools to manage my sites. This includes things like search submission, keywords, and robots.txt. I recently got a partner email from Microsoft (the company I work for is a MS partner) and in that message was a link to Microsoft’s Tools Ad Labs. I did not know these even existed. I started playing with the location tool it is pretty interesting.

(MS webmaster tools) – http://adlab.microsoft.com/alltools.aspx

If you have used these tools and recommend anything let me know.

(google webmaster tools) – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

I think that microsoft is finally doing something right with their Beta system. Even though there were issues the Windows 7 Beta seems to be a success. People who wanted to test it could download and install (maybe not the first 2 days due to capacity of the servers) .

I am currently in the Azure beta (limited beta) and that is also going well. Overall, it seems like Microsoft is catching on by letting people (the public) be part of their beta programs and doing it well. Realizing that the Microsoft Beta is different than the Google Beta (Think Gmail, which just got out of beta).

Here is an article that talks about the Windows 7 beta being extended (Windows 7 Extended till Feb 12)