I was searching for a stand alone installer for windows live writer, instead of the dumbed down live services installer so that I could install live writer onto my Win2k3 workstation. Thankfully, they just released a tech preview of a new version, and it comes as a stand alone installer, which installed on Win2k3. You can download the preview here. This is not a side by side install, your previous file versions are overwritten, but all of your settings and plug-ins are preserved.

As far as new features go, the fact that I could install on Win2k3 was enough for me, but they added tabs at the bottom of the main screen to allow you to quickly switch from edit to preview to source mode very easily.

Hopefully I will be getting some time to write some more content as I’ve been too quiet lately and being able to easily blog from my main workstation at home (running win2k3) will help with this.

Update:

There is a new auto linking feature that I’m still trying to test out. This is similar functionality to content filters in dasBlog (that was a auto link), but is limited to setting up hyper links with common text, where as content filters can be setup for text or RegEx and the replacement value can be anything. The nice thing about auto-linking, is that you can see your links as you type them in live writer. However, content filters apply to your entire site and can be changed to update all text in all your posts.