Richard Farrar’s Blog

In the blogging community, the debate over the use of full or partial RSS feeds seems to rage on with no sign of abating. Elsewhere, the decision seems much more straightforward.

So what is all the fuss about? Well, it’s all about the description field in the RSS feed and whether it should just contain a summary of the article being linked to, or the complete article in its entirety.

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Do desktop blogging clients offer any significant advantages over using the native web based WYSIWYG editors included with most blogging platforms or are they just an extra layer of fluff?

Being relatively new to this blogging malarkey, I hadn’t heard of desktop blogging clients until the other day when I was reading an article by a professional blogger Darren Rowse at ProBlogger on his “blog posting workflow“, in which he made reference to using a desktop blogging client called ecto.

While ecto was originally a Mac only client, there is now also a Windows version, however, it’s not free, and being a bit tight fisted I decided to scour the web to see what else was available for Windows.

After a bit of searching, I came across Windows Live Writer, a free blogging client for Windows from Microsoft. One quick download later and time to experiment…

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“To blog, or not to blog, that is the question“, or that was the question, and one that I’ve now clearly answered after much deliberation, but How and Why?

How?

This was the easy one. After a general trawl around the web and much Stumbling, it became plainly apparent that the blogging platform of choice was WordPress.

I already had my own domain (www.richardfarrar.com), which I’d had for quite a while, however this was presently being hosted on a Windows server running ASP scripting (WordPress requires PHP scripting and a MySQL database). So…

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