9 Ways to Get More Out of Windows Live Writer
Chances are, if you’re a blogger, you’ve heard about Microsoft’s free blogging tool, Windows Live Writer (WLW). In case you haven’t heard about it, WLW is an offline WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) blogging tool that integrates very nicely with most blogging platforms, allowing you to create and edit blog posts from your desktop. Although it is usually great fun to mock Microsoft’s efforts, as it happens WLW is really very cool. If you regularly write for several different sites, it can really help to simplify your blogging life!
Unlike a lot of Microsoft products, WLW makes a strong effort to work with a variety of non-Microsoft services and products. So while it gives Microsoft’s own “Live Spaces” service pride of place in the setup dialog, WLW works well with a variety of blogging platforms, from hosted services like Google’s Blogger and Wordpress.com to Wordpress and other blogging programs hosted on your own servers — it even works with non-mainstream platforms like Drupal, albeit minus a few of the bells and whistles.
Setup is pretty easy, as WLW works hard to auto-detect your website’s settings. You might need to tell WLW where the interface is on your host — it’s usually a file called “xmlrpc.php”, and I’ve found that if I just assume it’s at “www.[domain name].com/xmlrpc.php”, it usually works. Once you’re set up, WLW will download the stylesheet and post template, so as you write your posts you can see exactly how it will look when it’s posted.
WLW is pretty straightforward, but here’s a few pointers to some of the intermediate and advanced features that WLW offers:
- Categories: WLW reads the categories from your site, so click “categories” at the bottom of the post window and check off whatever categories you want your post to go in. If you use tags as categories, a list of all your previously-used tags will come up — useful if you want to avoid using multiple variations of the same idea (e.g. “e-book”, “ebooks”, and “e-books”).
- Set Publish Date: If your blogging software allows you to schedule posts to go “live” in the future, you’ll find a drop-down calendar at the bottom next to the categories field.
- Tagging: Hit the double up-arrow at the bottom of the post window (or press “F2″) and a range of other options will open up, including a tagging field. List your tags just like you would if you were editing online.
- The “Read More” tag: For blogs like Wordpress, where you use the <!–more–> tag to mark the end of the excerpt you want on the front page of your blog, the same thing is accomplished by placing your cursor where you want the “Read More” tag and selecting “Split Post” from the “Format” menu.
- Remind yourself: If you’re the kid of person who forgets to add categories, tags, and titles to your posts, open the “Options” (in the “Tools” menu) and under “Preferences” check off “Remind me to specify a title before publishing”, “Remind me to add categories before publishing”, and “Remind me to add tags before publishing”. When you go to publish or save a draft to your site, WLW will check that all these are present and, if not, ask you to add them.While you’re in the “Options”, go to “Spelling” and check “Check spelling before publishing”, too — this will launch the spell-checker automatically when you go to publish your post.
- Use templates: If you use snippets of text, code, or other mterial regularly, you can use a plugin to save and insert templates. I use Joe Cheng’s Dynamic Template Plugin, which is the most flexible: you can create templates with several fields and containing any kind of text or code you want, even interactive fields (though I admit I’m not enough of a programmer to understand how this works, but watch the demo on the site). Then you select “Insert Template” from the “Insert” menu (or the sidebar) and select whichever template you want to use. Boom! Instant text.
- Insert pictures: You can use the built-in “Insert Picture” dialog to add images from your hard drive, but you can also use a variety of plugins to add images from services like Picasa and Flickr.
- Round-up links from del.icio.us: The del.icio.us bookmark plugin will collect your links from del.icio.us, convert them into HTML, and insert them into your post. Coupled with the template plugin above, this s a pretty handy way to do almost instant daily or weekly round-ups of links you want to tell you readers about
- Blog This: “Blog This” plugins are available for both IE and Firefox users, allowing you to highlight some text on a webpage, hit the “Blog This” button, and open a new post with your elected text already inserted in WLW. If you’re using IE, you can add the ‘blog it!” button to Windows Live Toolbar; Firefox users use the Firefox plugin.
I have a few minor quibbles with WLW, like the fact that I can change the date a post will be published but not the time — which forces me to use the “Post Draft and Edit Online” feature instead of just publishing directly. But by and large, WLW works the way I blog, and because it integrates into so many services I can a single tool on my desktop instead of logging in to half a dozen separate websites and using half a dozen different interfaces.
Do you have any tips to offer WLW users? Or is there another tool you prefer to use — any why? Tell us in the comments.
WRITER'S BIOGRAPHY
Dustin Wax
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
Tags: 
Get your own Avatars at 
Loading ...
Comments
Joe Cheng [MSFT] says on December 3rd, 2007 at 11:32 am
Thanks for the review! You can change the time by clicking on it (rather than the button at the right of the date/time control).
phil says on December 3rd, 2007 at 11:43 am
i also use WLW and like you, i find it to be a really great tool. i like the WYSIWYG UI.
one of the things that i thought was helpful specially when i can’t think of anything to blog is the add-in on “thought of the day”. i know, i know. some of them are cheesy, but it gets me starting anyhow. i have not really explored much of the other add-ins. but i hope they do come up with other cool stuff.
one thing that you might want to write about (and something that I have not unlocked) is embedding videos from MSN Videos/Soapbox. I get by with YouTube – but there are some interesting videos on Soapbox and MSN Videos that I would like to blog about. Unlike YouTube that you can embed, the videos from MSN don’t seem to be embeddable.
Anyway, thanks for the tips!
Oh. I also use MacJournal from my Mac – primarily because they don’t have WLW for Macs. But MacJournal is passable – I still like WLW really.
Dan says on December 3rd, 2007 at 1:15 pm
I love WLW it has made writing so much easier and I blog about 100 times more then before. I downloaded an add-on that allows you to upload files which is nice when posting files. It makes adding images to your post a snap as you can just copy and paste the images, before I was uploading to the website and then linking that way. I am very amazed that this is a Micro$oft product because I think it is very well done!
maplist says on December 3rd, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Never heard of this. Try it later…
Jeff B says on December 4th, 2007 at 12:26 am
Great review and some good pointers listed. I use WLW and find myself blogging more often because of it. I like the fact if you have multiple blogs (i.e. blogger, wordpress, spaces, etc…) you can make one post swith to the other blog(s) and add categories and publish again without retyping.
I do wish it could count the number of words in a post. Maybe someone can make an add-in for that.
Thanks
Terinea Weblog says on December 4th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Windows Live Writer is an excellent blogging tool, well done Microsoft!
Jamie
Mike Law Blog says on December 5th, 2007 at 1:50 am
Ok – I’ve heard about this so many times – I’m gonna check it out! :)
hakan okan says on December 9th, 2007 at 12:15 am
You can change the time by clicking on it (rather than the button at the right of the date/time control).
Kathy says on December 11th, 2007 at 11:19 am
I love WLW, except for one thing. There isn’t enough space between paragraph breaks and, as far as I can tell, no way to modify that.
Maybe I’m over-analyzing and my readers won’t have a problem with readability. For my tastes, the paragraphs run too close together.
Dustin Wax says on December 11th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Kathy — as far as I know, the space between paragraphs is determined by your blog’s stylesheet, not WLW — you could try adding some padding to the
tag in your stylesheet (though this might affect more than just posts).
Kathy says on December 13th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Dustin — You are correct. I just realized that. I’ve changed my template to one where the spacing is more to my liking.
One other thing I’ve discovered with WLW is the issue with the time stamp. Even though I have my time set correctly in WordPress, when I went to publish a new post today using WLW, it set the time 5 hours ahead, and apparently no way to edit that. I’m not sure if it’s a bug in WLW, or if I’ve just done something wrong.
Overall, I love WLW!
Dustin Wax says on December 13th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Kathy — I have the same problem, except with me it’s 4 hours ahead. I’ve started time-stamping mine 4 hours earlier, which seems to do the trick. I’m assuming it has something to do with the time on the server that’s physically hosting the site, but I haven’t (so far) found a setting that changes this behavior.
Kathy says on December 13th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Dustin — Thanks. I guess for now I’ll just tweak the time when I post. It’s funny that you can’t go into WordPress “scheduled posts” and just change the time there, at least not that I’ve found. I’m so new to WordPress. I have tons to learn.
Cory Countryman says on December 19th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Not familiar with this but will see. Cory Countryman
tracy Ho says on December 22nd, 2007 at 12:31 am
Great tips for sharing,
All the best & Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.
Tracy Ho
wisdomgettingloaded
alex j. flex says on December 28th, 2007 at 9:42 am
Thanks for info, and wish you good luck!
Lyn Foley says on January 23rd, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Found your post when looking for a solution to the “read More” problem I’m having with my new blog on blogger. I tried your tip #4, looked for “Split Post” under format, but it is greyed out, and I tried every setting I can think of, but can’t get it to turn on.
Any help on why “Split post” is not an active choice?
Thanks for that.
BillinDetroit says on April 29th, 2008 at 3:45 am
I try to use WLW for nearly all of my posts but I would like to be able to send the same post to more than one blog with a single mouse-click. I maintain several blogs and often-times I will realize that a post would actually fit on two or more of them. It would be nice simply to select the second blog rather than having to loop back to WLW after posting to the first one.
BillinDetroit says on April 29th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Back again … to thank you for the link to writerstechnology.com . Lots of good stuff there!
Dustin Wax says on April 29th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Thanks, Bill — for visiting here *and* there. I wish I knew an answer on posting to multiple blogs. As a general rule, it’s not a great idea in terms of Google’s and other search engines ranking of duplicate content, but surely there are times (e.g. posting to several internal corporate blogs at the same time) when it would be useful.
Anonymous says on September 7th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Can anyone answer Lyn’s comment about the Split Post option being greyed out. Currently I have 3 posts published to my blog and I have not been able to go back through and split those posts after learning about the split post because the damn option has always been greyed out.
Chris says on February 10th, 2009 at 2:38 am
Windows live writer is a Wonderful blogging tool
Spellcrafter says on April 30th, 2009 at 4:20 am
This post was my primary reason for reconsidering WLW. Thanks Dustin.