I have been a happy use of Windows Live Writer, for producing blog posts and other online article, for quite a few years and it’s always great to happen upon a new feature that saves time. This latest feature I only noticed after I recently downloaded Windows Live Writer 2012.

Windows Live Writer works well with WordPress, and other Content Management Systems, as it allows articles to be produced offline, formatted, and uploaded to a website as and when necessary.

The latest time saver is the Automatic Linking option buried under the Options Menu. Automatic Linking allows you to link words and phrases, as you type them, to specific web pages. This can save a lot of time and offer more scope for article readers to drill down into topics of interest.

This can be helpful, for example if you have a Glossary section of your website, or simply want to link phrases, that need a little more explanation, to existing web pages.

To access the feature click on the pull down menu in the Live Writer toolbar, then click Options, then Automatic Linking where you will be presented with a list box for Term and Web Address.

Three self-explanatory buttons appear at the right hand side of the Automatic Linking box allowing you to Add, Edit, and Remove linked term. At the bottom you can also specify whether to automatically link terms and whether to only link the terms once per article.

Upon clicking Add you can enter the Text to activate the automatic linking, for example “Technology News”, then a web address, for this example it could link to the news section of a tech blog, and finally you can choose for the link to open in a new windows (otherwise it will open in the same browser window). Clicking on the Advanced button allows you to set an optional Title, which I would highly recommend, and an optional Rel tag.

If set, the Rel tag can indicate one of four options:

• Tag – used to meta tag a piece of web page content
• Enclosure – usually indicates a download of some kind
• License – indicates the web page is a licensed page such as a Creative Commons license
• NoFollow – tells search engines and other agents not to endorse the resulting link