I had a pleasant surprise the other day when I discovered there had been an update to my all-time favourite blogging application, Microsoft Live Writer.  It is included as part of the Windows Live Essentials 2011 release which can be downloaded from here.

One thing that has always amazed me is that with the Apple Mac always being popular with the more ‘creative’ used-Converse wearing ‘creatives’ amongst us, why isn’t there a decent blogging application for OS X?  Sure there are a few Ok’ish Apple based blogging tools such as Mars Edit and Ecto out there but they, in my opinion, fall way short of the usability and functionality found with the Windows only Microsoft Live Writer.  I would be prepared to pay good money for a native OS-X Live Writer version or equivalent as Live Writer is one of the remaining reasons (the other being for VMware vCenter Server Client) why I still have to run Windows 7 under Fusion on my MacBook Pro. 

A large part of the reason for my liking Live Writer is in it’s ease of use and familiar look and feel to that of the Microsoft Office range of products.  The real icing on the cake are the really useful community developed plug-ins that you can add to Live Writer to extend its already rich functionality.  That said, most of the plug-ins are now 2+ years old making me think that perhaps that my beloved Live Writer utility may just fade out…  Luckily with this latest update, Live Writer 2011, this is obviously not the case – hurray!

Did I mention that Live Writer was also free?  Well, unlike many things these days Live Writer is part of the Microsoft Live suite of products and is free to download and use.  So if you’re a blogger using a Microsoft Windows based OS there is no excuse not to download it and give it a try, I think you’ll be impressed and will find it hard to go back to your old blogging application.

One thing to look out for when downloading and installing Live Writer is that the installer will also try and install the other products from the Microsoft Live portfolio such as SilverLight or MSN Messenger which you may not use or want to install.  These extra utilities and applications however can be de-selected at install time.

The most obvious difference between the previous version of Live Writer 2009 and the latest Live Writer 2011 is the interface.  The new updated interface found in the 2011 version has had a major facelift which gives it the same look and feel as the ribbon bar found in MS Office 2007 +.

Below: The old Windows Live Writer 2009 interface

Below: the updated Windows Live Writer 2011 interface

This is the first blog post I’ve created in LiveWriter 2011 and I have to say I like the improved interface experience, sure it is taking me a few seconds longer to find the new location of the features though this is par for the course for any new updated interface.

After upgrading to Live Writer any 3rd party plug-ins you may have already installed and enable will also be available.

Another improvement/bug fix with Live Writer 2011 is that I have found that the ‘Preview’ function now displays my blog correctly which is certainly useful when making sure that a new blog post looks how I want before publishing it.

A last point of note is that the Microsoft Live Writer blog has now moved to here so this is worth book-marking if you use the application.

Congratulations to the Microsoft Windows Live Writer team for producing such a decent update to an already excellent product – keep up the good work and thanks for making my ability to blog an easier and more pleasurable experience!

After a problematic month where the TechHead site gets taken offline without notice by my hosting provider for consuming between 5-10% of CPU resource it was time to start looking for a new home for TechHead.

In fairness I had probably outgrown the shared hosting platform the site was running on as the site now receives close to 85,000 hits per month and moves over 100GB of traffic.  The issue I had however was with the site getting taken offline without so much as a warning email !

 Looking around I weighed up all the options from hiring a dedicated server, more shared hosting right through to finding colo for my own server.  All had pro’s and con’s though at the end of the day it came down to the financials as hosting or finding colo for your own server can cost serious money which the sponsorship I have on the site unfortunately won’t go anywhere near covering.

Though at the suggestion of Quest Software’s Joe Baguley (@joebaguley) I took at look at Memset’s hosting offerings.  I had heard of Memset before though wasn’t familiar with their hosting packages butafter taking a look I was impressed with their range of hosting solutions.

So, if you are reading this then you have reached TechHead’s new home on a MemSet Miniserver VM Virtual Server!  It now feels quite liberating to have full control of the server from which the site is being run from and most importantly I no longer have to worry about TechHead being taken off line due to using 5-10% of the hosting servers CPU resource.  In fact I now have a pair of Xeon processors to utilise!

Thanks to all my followers and readers on TechHead, I appreciate your feedback and comments – keep them coming and I hope you enjoy the new go-fast, more reliable site. 

This ended up being quite a find for someone like myself who runs their blog on WordPress but has no clue when it comes to PHP.  I wanted to make a couple of minor tweaks to the code of the site and found the information in this basic PHP tutorial by Adam Brown valuable and thought it worth a mention.

So if you, like me, have limited knowledge of PHP and are thinking of having a dabble on your WordPress press site or similar  it’d be well worth checking it out.

I’ve been meaning to do it for weeks and have finally upgraded the Tech Head blog to WordPress v2.5.1.

I thought I’d give this neat little automatic upgrade plug-in called, funnily enough, the ‘WordPress Automatic Upgrade’ plug-in a try.

It claims to be pain free, backs all important files, downloads the latest WordPress release and then installs it.

I made my own manual backup of everything before hand – not that I’m untrusting.  Yeah, right…  But this proved completely unnecessary as it really did what it said on the side of the tin. 

The whole site was backed up and upgraded within 5 minutes. 

Now why can’t all software be this good?