Third day with Windows Live Writer

by on August 16, 2006

I am liking Windows Live Writer so far, but I’m not pushing the edges like some others are (I saw a bunch of complaints about bugs in some of the weirder features. I just type and post, so it works great for me so far).

Anyway, just saw that Ed Holloway has an Ink Blog Beta out for Tablet PC users.

One problem with the Windows Live Writer is the tagging support. It has categories, but that capability sucks. So I gotta open each post back up in the browser and apply categories there.

  • There is a plugin available already that allows adding Technorati and other tags to the posts. Seems to work OK. Get it from: http://www.timheuer.com/blog/archive/2006/08/14...
  • You need to get Matt to implement the "Simple Tags" plugin for you. http://www.broobles.com/scripts/simpletags/ Makes my life extremely easy for tagging and works with Windows Live writer. You just type the following syntax into your post > [tags]Tagging, Wordpress, Scoble, blog [/tags]

    -Jeff O'Hara
    http://blog.zemote.com
  • I haven't had an ounce of trouble using Live Writer so far. I am using at http://chris.leckness.com (Word Press) and mobilitysite.com (Movable Type) and loving it so far. I use the Live Toolbar, so its really nice when trolling around for cool stuff and find something, I can click "Blog it" and pump them out!

    With Movable Type, I use a hack that makes my keywords Technorati tags, so I am cool there!
  • Robert
    give Blogdesk a try (www.blogdesk.org)... a lot smoother (and although they quote me on their main page I've got no arrangement with them, just love the program). However if the Writer guys allow me to crop images and name from within Writer them I might think about coming across to the dark side :-)
  • One persistent problem with LiveWriter is that it does not support non-English characters. I have a Norwegian-language blog (www.espen.com/norskblogg) and an English-language one (../weblog), both on Movable Type 3.2. Works wonderfully with the Engslish one, but look at the mess it makes out of the Norwegian characters æ, ø and å: http://www.espen.com/norskblogg/archives/2006/0...
  • Hey Espen,

    Writer posts in UTF-8. You have meta tags indicating iso-8859-1. I'm guessing it's too late to switch over considering you have tons of content on your blog already encoded in iso-8859-1, but if you ever start a new blog and want it to work with Writer, remember to make sure it's UTF-8 (most blog providers these days default to it AFAICT).
  • Hey Robert - thanks for the link!

    When are we going to see a Ink post on your blog? :-)
  • Duncan: check out LiveWriter Onscreen is a Live Writer add-on. Its not a plugin. It's more like a Live Writer powertoy. Snip screens and upload to Flickr (and then use them in your blog post)
  • I like Live Writer but can't really use it on a regular basis because of the way it uploads photos to my blog.

    I like to put all my photos in the /Images folder, but I can't figure out how to force it to just dump the photos in there without creating a sub-directory under /Images for photos releated to a specific post.

    It's a great first effort, though.
  • Joe (post no. 7),
    thanks for the tip - I will change my blog over to a new ISP shortly and will take the opportunity to change to UTF-8.
blog comments powered by Disqus