You can log onto your Wordpress admin screen in your browser to create a blog post, but by far the slickest and easiest way for a Windows user to create and edit their blog posts is with Microsoft’s free and amazingly awesome Windows Live Writer.

With this slick desktop application, you can manage as many blogs as you want, regardless of what type of blogging service it is (Wordpress, Blogger, etc.). You can create posts, add categories to them, save them as drafts either locally or on the website, then retrieve them later to complete. It even downloads all the stylesheets in your blog so that you can see the way it’s going to look after it’s posted.

And the part that has made me squeal with delight is how effortless it is to add images and video. All you have to do is copy (Ctrl-C) from the web, Word, your desktop or anywhere, then paste (Ctrl-V) right into Live Writer. The image resizes itself, allows you to link to the full-size image if you wish (click the image above to see what I mean), and when you click "publish," it automatically posts the image too.

If you want to embed a Youtube video, for instance, all you have to do is copy and paste the source code into Live Writer:

And instantly, it transforms it to this:

No messin’ around with HTML! Sweet!

Say what you want about Microsoft’s typically kludgy interfaces and bloated software, but this is one example of where they got it exactly right. (Another other one is Microsoft OneNote which has totally transformed the way I work… more on that later.)