Windows Live Writer is a handy tool for offline content writing. If you are using WordPress on your blog, you can configure windows live writer for your blog and write your posts or pages offline.
It provides an option to send posts as a draft or publish it from the tool itself. The good thing is editor, which comes with the tool. It provides all flexibility as Microsoft word like spell correction, hyperlink etc. and remote publishing.
The other benefit is that it download your theme and provide an interface same as your blog to write, so you can see the post as it would have been on your blog even while writing the post. It also allows to schedule the post from the user interface.
If you want to set up Windows live writer for your blog than follow the below steps.
Setup Blog for Windows Live Writer
- Enable XML-RPC Publishing Protocol under Writing setting of your blog.
If you are using Thesis theme than enable the windows live writer support from site option under Thesis theme settings.
Setup Windows Live Writer
Open Windows Live Writer. Click on Options (If you are opening it first time, it will automatically ask to add an account).
- You can click on account to add a blog.
- Enter your blog address, Username and password.
- It will try to detect the settings for your blog, if successful that you are ready for writing offline content.
- If it is not able to detect the settings automatically then it will allow you to do the setting manually.
Once you are done you can write new blog post or new pages from the live writer and save it locally till you work on them.
It allows you to work on multiple blogs, so you can configure all of your blogs and write posts on it from there.
Video Guide for Setting up Windows Live Writer for WordPress
[youtube src=”taSLA163UeQ”]
Hope you would have liked the post and enjoy using windows live writer with WordPress blog.
Thank you for this post, I love Live Writer and it’s really a time saver and there are significant advantages to using software like Live Writer for blogging or article writing software.
i am quite late to know about the potential “windows live writer” bears, just installed and willing to see great post published directly via desktop.
the only thing i am concerned about is “how to set featured image from windows live writer” and other issue is with “copying images to windows live writer” which may generate image url issue.
hope to hear you on this front.
thanks a lot for wonderful post.
While trying to connect WLW to WP I was getting the “Windows Live Writer was not able to automatically detect your blog” error. I have two WP blogs, one public and the other invite-only. I was getting that error only on the invite-only one. To work around, I only had to set it to public in the WP settings.privacy section, make the WLW connection, and then set the privacy back to private.
Nice post sanjeev. You can also use RSS Feed pauser plugin…when ever you need to update theme via WIndows live writer.. This way you will avoid creating temp post…
Hi Harsh, Thanks for adding the tip regarding RSS feed pauser plugin. It is a good way to stop sending that temp post.
Must admit to have never having heard of Windows Live Writer before but then I’ve only been developing my own WP sites for a few months so am still mastering the basics of adding posts. Your 5 Step Guide’s section on plugins was particularly useful. I can see I will be adding your site to my reference library to assist my learning curve.
Thanks Jonathon, If you are working on windows than I would say Windows Live writer is a must have tool. Its free and have a good editing capabilities. You can even edit your images to add special effects from it. I would defiantly recommend to give it a try. At first I would recommend to post as draft initially and once you are comfortable you can publish from the tool.
This is really great post! I been using a different tool for this but now I feel like live writer is a great tool to use. Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
It is really great and easy to use tool. WordPress editor is not that great and it makes writing posts easy and fun. You can give many effects to your photos etc.
Although I have heard about the tool never actually used the tool, but after your review and the looking at the comments it sure looks like a must have tool
This is a great tool, much better editor for writing the posts, also gives lot of other formatting options as there are lot of add-on’s available.
I should also mention that I write almost 100% of all my articles across 7 sites with Windows Live Writer, the only thing I have to do is re-edit the article in the WordPress editor to add Featured Image (which some of my themes require) and do some SEO / EasyAzon stuff.
There is a plugin which sets Featured Image for Live Writer posts as it publishes to your blog but I found it only worked for 2 of my 3 blogs and was more annoying than helpful.
The other downside of Live Writer is that if you cut/paste images from memory directly into Live Writer they will have lousy filenames that aren’t SEO friendly with no easy way to rename. Make sure when you insert images into Live writer you saved them off to your PC first, then make sure you make the file have a good SEO friendly file name before copying it into Live Writer.
I also do image work on my blog and that one of the reason I always post draft to my blog rather than publish is from Windows Live Writer.
Thanks for tip on XML-RPC protocol, I will update the post to say it correctly don’t want to enable any extra thing on blogs which we are not using.
Just FYI, you don’t need Atom publishing enabled just XML-RPC, you shouldn’t have both enabled unless you really use both services to publish remotely to your blog.
Windows Live writer is a great tool if you are using Windows. I stopped using Windows way back and the alternatives available aren’t that good.
Yes alternatives are not good for this, I usually keep Windows and Linux both on my laptop so I can use any tool which I would like.
Fantastic tutorial. I use a lot live writer when creating a blog post and I love it. I don’t think I ever use the WordPress editor anymore, well maybe only to either reedit a post or do some changes before going live. Thumbs up! Live writer is a great tool
I also use wordpress editor for only re-edit my drafts, but I use live writer for writing the posts. With the addition of add-on’s its great.
but personally i prefer blogdesk, even if it doesn’t hve support for blogger
livewriter is bit slow and hw can we set a name for image that copied from clipboard…?
I have not tried blogdesk, will check that.
I usually works with Live writer because ease of usability, It also links your youtube account to get the easy access and word support is great. I look into image stuff as I usually do that online on the blog.
Very informative post. Unfortunately, I’m using a Mac OS and won’t be able to use it. Is there anything similar to this that you can suggest for us Mac users?
This might be only one tool which Mac users will envy. I don’t think there is any free tool for Mac users which is as good as windows live writer. Though there are few good paid tools. I am not a mac user so can’t point much right now.
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