Windows Live Writer

» see windowslivewriter.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Windows Live Writer started life as a product called Onfolio, which Microsoft acquired in 2006. The first Live-branded release shipped on November 6 2007 as part of Windows Live Writer 2008. The pitch was simple: a desktop application for writing blog posts that knew how to talk to most of the platforms people actually used. Blogger and WordPress made up the heaviest part of the target list, with TypePad and Microsoft's own Live Spaces close behind. Anything else that spoke the MetaWeblog API or had a Really Simple Discovery endpoint was also a candidate.

The 2012 release on August 7 2012 was the last meaningful update. Microsoft did not formally kill the product, it just stopped touching it. The Windows Essentials suite that included Mail and Photo Gallery and Movie Maker and Writer entered a multi-year freeze. The retirement was announced for the whole bundle: January 10 2017, end of support, downloads pulled. Live Writer was inside that announcement as one line item in a list of five.

Two years before the official retirement, on December 9 2015, Scott Hanselman announced that he and a group of volunteers inside and outside Microsoft had gotten permission to fork Live Writer as an open-source project on GitHub. They called it Open Live Writer. The codebase shed the Live ID dependency, dropped a couple of services that no longer existed, and kept publishing to the platforms people still cared about. That fork is the only piece of Windows Essentials with a pulse in 2026.

Live Writer was on a lot of Windows desktops in the years it was relevant. i had it installed at some point during the university stretch, more out of curiosity than because i was running a blog with any consistency. The Turkish blog scene of 2008 to 2010 was on Blogger and WordPress with a long tail on TypePad, and Live Writer talked to all of them. i remember the icon and the way the editor would silently grab your blog template so the preview looked right. i did not use it long enough to feel its disappearance.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually did ~

Live Writer's real trick was the WYSIWYG preview. Most blogging tools of the era either gave you a text box that looked nothing like the published post, or a browser-side rich editor that ran into pasting problems and image upload limits. Live Writer pulled your blog's CSS down on first connect, rendered your post inside that template offline, and let you write a post on a plane and queue it for publish later. Images got resized and uploaded over XML-RPC. Tables were a menu away. You could edit raw HTML when you needed to, and the editor would not eat your markup.

Plug-ins extended the editor in the way Office plug-ins extended Word. There was a working ecosystem around it for several years: syntax highlighting plug-ins, Flickr integration, Amazon affiliate-link insertion, map embedding. Most of those plug-ins stopped getting updates around the 2012 freeze, but the core editor stayed usable for years past that.

~ the open source rescue ~

Hanselman's December 2015 fork is one of the cleaner stories in Microsoft's open-source pivot under Satya Nadella. The codebase had been sitting unchanged since 2012, the brand was on its way out, and a couple of program managers spent months working through the legal and IP cleanup to get permission to publish it on GitHub. Open Live Writer 0.5 shipped on day one. Subsequent releases kept the publishing pipeline working with Blogger's new API, removed dead spelling and map services, dropped the Live ID requirement so you did not need a Microsoft account to install it.

The fork is not heavily developed in 2026. It does not need to be. The product was already feature complete in 2012. What matters is that it still installs, still publishes, still talks to the blog platforms most independent writers use, and is not at Microsoft's mercy.

~ what it left ~

Live Writer was the rare piece of Microsoft consumer software that the people who used it actually loved. The Hanselman fork being legitimately maintained is a kind of community vote on which Essentials apps had real users. Mail, Photo Gallery and Movie Maker got the same January 2017 retirement notice. None of them have surviving forks. Writer got one because writers were paying attention.

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