Writing articles directly from your blog default web interface is not always a pleasant task, especially when you want to put more formatting and pictures to the article. Professional bloggers prefer desktop editors because they can speed up the blogging process, easily manage blog posts and settings, and many extra functions.

Here is a list of common features for desktop blog editors:

• Support multiple blogging platforms
• Manage many blogs at one point, easily switch between blog accounts with just one click
• Create posts offline and update posts later with just one click
• Save local archive or draft
• Rich WYSIWYG text editor
• Easy to handle images and multimedia contents

I've gathered a list of several blog editor softwares that are free and highly rated:

1. Microsoft Windows Live Writer

Live Writer is my favorite blog editor, and perhaps the best at the moment. If you've got used to Microsoft Office applications, you can find this software easy to use.It has a clean and familiar interface with rich text editor, spelling check,

Another great feature that takes Live Writer ahead of other competitors is the support of pluggins to add more functions to this software

2. ScribeFire

Scribefire is not a stand alone software. It is a Firefox addons which helps you post to your blog from Firefox browser. It supports many blogging services including WordPress, LiveJournal, Xanga, Windows Live Spaces, Performancing, MySpace, Tumblr, Movable Type, Drupal and Blogger. ScribeFire supports drag-and-drop, lets you share your blog post on sites like Digg, Fark, and Reddit etc. from within Scribefire, and also ping service to ping-o-matic, Weblogs...

3. Zoundry Raven

Zoundry Raven is another free advanced WYSIWYG-blog editor with XHTML source editing, drag and drop images, video, and text from the Web, unicode (UTF-8) support, preview posts in your blog's template, multiple blogs management.

The interface is similar to Microsoft Outlook with folder tree on the left, post titles on the upper, and the content is in the lower part. Writing a new is also like writing a new email.

This editor is provided as portable software so that you could put in your flash drive and let you blog on the road.

4. W.bloggar

w.bloggar is a professional blog editor for advanced users. It has a lot more advanced features built-in than Live Writer.

With w.bloggar you can save posts locally for further publishing, import text files, post to many blogs and ping to Weblogs.Com, blo.gs, Technorati and ping-o-matic. There is also a portable version so that you can take with your anywhere on a USB drive.

5. Qumama

Qumana has a very simple and user friendly interface with the left side bar lists all your blogs and the main pane lists the recent posts of the selected blog. The pane below it displays the content of the selected post.

To ceate new post, clicking on ‘New post’ and the post editor will be opened in a new window. The post editor has common formatting options and also lets you configure some post settings, like aloowing comments or tracbacks.

What other desktop blog editors are you using? What are their features? Please share your favorites here.