I continue to be a huge fan of offline blog editors. My favorite being Windows Live Writer. I found out today from Scobleizer that there was a new version available so I immediately jumped over to the Windows Live Writer site to download the update.

Of late I’ve noticed that some of my complaints with Windows Live Writer is that it does some weird things with renaming files and adding some HTML that I’d rather they wouldn’t. Not surprising from Microsoft, but one of those things I wish they’d really thing about performing their own little cease & desist option. I was wishfully thinking of this as the update file was downloading.

Some of the features and improvements in this update include:

• “Instant photo” border treatment
• Insert multiple photos
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Spell checking in: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia), Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• Server-side tagging (support coming soon to WordPress.com and BlogEngine.NET)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Improved blog account setup
• Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Support for bidirectional languages
• Updated look and feel

The server-side tagging support will be really great when it happens. But no mention in this list of my wishes and desires mentioned above.

My other request would be for Windows Live Writer to be able to browse through my uploads folder and let me view all the previous images I’ve uploaded as a gallery kind of function. That would be really helpful in finding an image you know you uploaded before without having to upload another copy of it again.

Image: Screen capture from "Help" menu on Windows Live Writer

The question today is whether or not there is an easy, efficient and effective way to “tag” files. My brother presented the question to me initially and I began searching. The goal is to be able to tag any file whatsoever and then be able to search for one of those keywords and see all files that relate to that keyword.

I was thinking that Windows Vista was supposed to improve on this, but there’s got to be a way to do it in Windows XP as well.

After doing a quick search I found these results but I’m wondering what kind of information everyone else has.

• Tagging files in Windows XP (and why you’ll ditch Google Desktop)
• Tagging files under windows XP or Vista
• Tag files to help find them later

Are you familiar with anything in those articles? It all seems pretty standard and basic to me, but it leaves me with one question. Does it work for you? I’m using Windows Desktop Search and not Google Desktop Search.

Which one have you found that works best for you? Why do you feel that way?

One thing I wish Windows Live Writer would do is make the keywords functionality available from the “Properties” window a Tag Provider option along with the other tag providers like: flickr, BuzzNet, Technorati, IceRocket, etc.

I’ll say it again as well, you really need to provide a function for me to browse through my uploads directory and review all the images that are available on my server already.