Request: Windows Live Writer as a Portable App

As part of my return to blogging, I’ve been trying out the new Windows Live Writer.  For anyone who doesn’t know, WL Writer is a free desktop client (read: Win32 code) for creating and posting blog entries.  Some cool benefits of it are: WYSIWYG creation, offline drafting and editing, posting to any major blog service (not just Windows Live), and a nice plug-in API allowing anyone to extend its content capabilities.

Where I find it most valuable is for post creation while I’m traveling.  As I’m frequently on a plane, I’m often without connectivity when writing (at least for the initial drafts of a post).  The ability to have a tool that is designed for blog creation, rather than saving drafts as word documents or something, is very elegant.

Of course, this isn’t to say that Writer doesn’t have plenty of oddities and things that could be improved (its still a beta product) and maybe I’ll have a follow up post where I cover some items I could see improving.  However, for this post, there is only one item I’m calling out.

I’d like to see Writer become a portable application. 

Why make Writer portable?  In a nutshell, so I could keep everything I needed for blog authorship (complete with a history of my posts/drafts/etc.) in one place.  This one place could be kept with my keys and would allow me to be able to write blog postings on any machine that I happen to have access to (be it my laptop, my desktop at home, my wife’s laptop, a net cafe, etc.).

Unfortunately, you currently can’t even configure Writer where it should save the post files to.  Instead, they end up in everyone’s favorite dumping ground, “My Documents” (in a sub-folder names “My Weblog Posts”).  Hopefully the team will revisit this decision in the near future.