Enhance Your Wordpress Experience With Live Writer
A couple of years ago now, Microsoft actually did something pretty cool (a first) and made an application called Windows Live Writer, and one of the components of this app, is that you can use it to write your Wordpress Blog posts from your desktop. Why is this better than using the Wordpress admin panel you might ask? Well, if you’re like me and travel a lot and are on a plane, this is a perfect time to be creating new blog posts while you are without an Internet connection. I am going to teach you how to use Windows Live Writer with Wordpress right now, and it was my friend Harsh Agrawal that put me on to it not so long ago.
WLR works with XML-RCP,a which in layman’s terms means it is a technology that allows applications that are not Wordpress to interact and talk with your blog. In order to use WLR you will have to log in to your Wordpress admin panel and head to Settings > Writing > Remote Publishing and select the XML-RPC setting, and of course you must save your options.
Now it’s time to head over to Windows Live Writer and download and install the application. When you run the app for the first time you will be asked a few different options about exactly what you do want installed. Personally, I do not like Microsoft apps such as their tool bar, Messenger,Mail and other Live services, so I just want to select the Writer selection and install that. Just before you complete installation you will be asked to set your search provider and home page as MSN, and I recommend that you do not. Just a personal choice though. You will also be asked to use a Windows Live ID, and again, you can now close this window as the application has already been installed.
Using Windows Live Writer For The First Time For Wordpress
Open up the application from your Start Menu and you will have to configure it before you can sync it with your stand alone Wordpress blog. When the option come up to select which blog service you use, select Wordpress. Now you will have to put in the URL, as well as your Wordpress username and password and away you go.
The user interface is nice and clean, with a WYSIWYG and visual editor at the top, and down the side are your options to insert things such as links, pictures, tables and other media. At the bottom of the WLW interface is where you select your category, insert tags, and also your publish date if you want to postpone it. You will also notice that apart from the edit pane, you can select preview and source code too. You also have some advanced option below which you will have to click on the button to expand and see these. Here you can add an excerpt and put in Trackbacks to multiple URL’s.
Windows Live Writer Wordpress Video Tutorial
Possible Windows Live Writer Issues For Wordpress
There are a couple of things that I don’t like about WLW, and the main one was the fact that it is unable to specify custom fields, and for one particular plugin that I use, this was a major concern. However, after asking my best friend Google about it, he quickly told me there was a plugin bridge to overcome this issue. The plugin in question was All In One SEO Pack, and the location for the All In One SEO Pack Windows Live Writer Bridge is here. Another thing to watch out for is if you change the size of fonts of your Heading tags, it will change them to a different tag. For example, I use a H2 heading with a size 14 font, and WLW will change it to H4 if I change the font size. Luckily you can change it what you like, although if you did not check you probably would not have realised.
So that is pretty much how to use Windows Live Writer with Wordpress, and I suggest that you download the app and give it a go. If you blog a lot or just want to leverage your business on the web, then it will save you a lot of time as it loads a lot quicker that the Wordpress admin panel, and it is very easy to get used to.
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Clint, I use Live Writer for all of my blog posts. It’s feature rich and easy to use. I love the save as draft feature. I recently did a series of posts on MVC, it was nice to have the ability to have several draft posts saved in Live Writer.